The researchers wondered if collective movement might somehow trigger a more cooperative spirit, preventing the emergence of potential free riders. So they asked college students to march around campus together, or to sing the Canadian national anthem in unison.

Relative to students in a control condition, who had simply ambled about, the students who had walked in lockstep around campus were more cooperative in subsequent economic games, felt more connected to each other and trusted each other more.

Students who sang in unison showed the same effects relative to a control group of asynchronous singers. This effect even extended into games that pitted the good of the group against self-interest. Participants were willing to incur direct costs to themselves to cooperate with the students with whom they had synchronized.

Interestingly, it has already been shown that motor coordination of other sorts can serve “pro-social behavior,” behavior that contributes to the well-being of another person. For example, the tendency to unconsciously mimic nonverbal cues is related to altruism. In one study conducted by psychologist Rick van Baaren at the University of Nijmegen in The Netherlands, participants who had unknowingly been mimicked by an experimenter (in body orientation and arm and leg position) were more helpful to experimenters as well as unrelated others, on a subsequent task.

But these types of processes were thought to exclusively operate on a non-conscious level. The second someone becomes aware of the mimicking, these effects disappear. After all, who likes a copycat? Turns out, as long as we’re moving synchronously, we all do.

These new findings open the door to fascinating questions regarding what else synchronization can do for us. The ability to coordinate our own bodies in time and space with other entities has broad applications. For example, the ability to judge the motion of another entity (such as an individual or a ball) and coordinate the action of our own body to converge on a point where we can catch, kick or hit it has obvious implications for athletic performance and most likely factored into our ancestor’s success in hunting prey.  Any opportunity to practice the coordination of our bodies with others—a waltz, a jam session with friends, a tribal chant around the fire—might translate into future success at such tasks. Engaging in rituals involving rhythmic synchrony might not only have bound us together in cooperative groups: they might have brought us together to practice the very skills essential to survival.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Piercarlo Valdesolo is a Keiter Fellow in psychology at Amherst College.