Verbal Synchrony and Action Dynamics in Large Groups

Abstract

While synchronized movement has been shown to increase liking and feelings of togetherness between people, we investigated whether collective speaking in time would change the way that larger groups played a video game together. Anthropologists have speculated that the function of interpersonal coordination in dance, chants, and singing is not just to produce warm, affiliative feelings, but also to improve group action. The group that chants and dances together hunts well together. Direct evidence for this is sparse, as research so far has mainly studied pairs, the effects of coordinated physical movement, and measured cooperation and affiliative decisions. In our experiment, large groups of people were given response handsets to play a computer game together, in which only joint coordinative efforts lead to success. Before playing, the synchrony of their verbal behavior was manipulated. After the game, we measured group members' affiliation toward their group, their performance on a memory task, and the way in which they played the group action task. We found that verbal synchrony in large groups produced affiliation, enhanced memory performance, and increased group members' coordinative efforts. Our evidence suggests that the effects of synchrony are stable across modalities, can be generalized to larger groups and have consequences for action coordination.

Keywords: affiliation; behavioral coordination; cooperation; joint action; synchrony.

FIGURE 1

The tightrope game (taken from Richardson et al., 2011).

FIGURE 2

Example of a game played from a single trial of an experiment. The thick orange line shows the angle of the tightrope walker, and the thin blue line shows the net left or right nudge from a group of participants as they try to keep him upright.

FIGURE 3

Participants’ scores on memory for words (top) and group affiliation ratings (bottom). Red and blue lines show the distribution of scores in the asynchronous and synchronous chanting conditions. Gray lines show the Bayesian estimate of distribution of the difference between conditions and gray areas show their 95% credibility intervals.

FIGURE 4

The distance of the tightrope walker from the vertical at different levels of analysis: averaged across all games; averaged when each participant clicked; and plotted against the similarity between participants’ response. Groups that chanted asynchronously are in red, those that chanted synchronously are in blue.