Abstract
The literature on social interactions has shown that participants coordinate not only at the behavioral but also at the physiological and neural levels, and that this coordination gives a temporal structure to the individual and social dynamics. However, it has not been fully explored whether such temporal patterns emerge during interpersonal coordination beyond dyads, whether this phenomenon arises from complex cognitive mechanisms or from relatively simple rules of behavior, or which are the sociocultural processes that underlie this phenomenon. We review the evidence for the existence of group-level rhythmic patterns that result from social interactions and argue that the complexity of group dynamics can lead to temporal regularities that cannot be predicted from the individual periodicities: an emergent collective rhythm. Moreover, we use this interpretation of the literature to discuss how taking into account the sociocultural niche in which individuals develop can help explain the seemingly divergent results that have been reported on the social influences and consequences of interpersonal coordination. We make recommendations on further research to test these arguments and their relationship to the feeling of belonging and assimilation experienced during group dynamics.
Highlights
The Mexican wave propagates in stadiums through the action of successive groups of fans who briefly stand up with their arms up
In order to facilitate its study, we define an emergent collective rhythm (Figure 1B) as the temporal patterns of behavior arising in groups that cannot be predicted from the individual periodicities alone
The interpersonal coordination at different levels and modalities gives a temporal structure to the collective dynamics
Summary
The Mexican wave (hereinafter the wave) propagates in stadiums through the action of successive groups of fans who briefly stand up with their arms up (see Farkas et al, 2002). Even though other mechanisms (e.g., shared purpose or intentions) may explain those social effects, our approach emphasizes that the spontaneous coordination of bodily states may increase the probability of experiencing them These positive effects have been reported beyond dyads (von Zimmermann and Richardson, 2016; Jackson et al, 2018), physiological synchronization has been associated with group cohesion during, for example, teamwork or musical performance (Palumbo et al, 2016), and growing evidence in other social contexts suggests that this relationship is complex and non-linear (Palumbo et al, 2016; Wallot et al, 2016; Wood et al, 2018; Wiltshire et al, 2019; Mayo and Gordon, 2020; Dumas and Fairhurst, 2021; Hoehl et al, 2021). Distinguishing the emotional and sociocultural constraints and contingencies at the individual level (e.g., levels of empathy, internal tempo) from those at the level of the interaction (e.g., emotional content, goal, complexity of the task) and at the social level (e.g., social niche) can help to deepen our understanding of this complex relationship and its characteristics in both natural and artificial settings, for example, by shedding light on whether the cultural encoding in the participants is accountable for the antisocial effects observed during artificial manipulations, or whether individual differences in internal tempo can impact the intensity of the social effects reported by the participants of an interaction
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