Being in a crowd bonds people via physiological synchrony

Abstract

Collective events can generate intense emotions, shape group identities, and forge strong bonds. Do these effects extend to remote participation, and what are the psychological mechanisms underpinning their social power? We monitored psycho-physiological activity among groups of basketball fans who either attended games in-person (in a stadium) or watched games live on television in small groups. In-person attendance was associated with greater synchronicity in autonomic nervous system activation at the group level, which resulted in more transformative experiences and contributed to stronger identity fusion. Our findings suggest that the social effects of sports depend substantially on the inter-personal dynamics unfolding among fans, rather than being prompted simply by watching the game itself. Given the increasing prevalence of virtual experiences, this has potentially wide-reaching implications for many domains of collective human interaction.

Figure 1

Summary of experimental procedures.

Figure 2

MdRQA procedures and outcomes. (A) Representative segments of three normalized heart rate time series. (B) State space matrix built from the combination of heart rate time series after the average delay and the average embedded dimension were obtained. Only the highlighted portion of the time series is shown in the phase space matrix. (C) Distances between the point expressed in the coordinates of the first column and the points with coordinates defined in the other columns of the phase state matrix. (D) Recurrence matrix obtained after applying a distance criterion to the distance matrix. When a cell in the distance matrix contains a value within this criterion, a “1” is assigned to its correspondent position in the recurrence matrix; otherwise, a “0” is assigned. (E) Recurrence plot obtained from the recurrence matrix. Where the recurrence matrix contains a 1, a black square is drawn. In turn, white squares are drawn for 0 s. The first column is highlighted to show its correspondence with the first columns of the recurrence and the distance matrices. (F, G) Representative recurrence plots for each condition.

Figure 3

Boxplots of MdRQA outcomes. Large groups in the stadium displayed more physiological synchrony compared to small groups watching the games remotely.

Figure 4

Windowed MdRQA. Each time series of each game was divided into 21 overlapping windows (horizontal axis) extending 80% of the length of the original time series.

Figure 5

Moderated Mediation Model. Watching events in-person moderates the effect of group heart synchrony on self-transformativeness, which in turn leads to social bonding.