Abstract
Coordinated behavior promotes collaboration among humans. To shed light upon this relationship, we investigated whether and how interpersonal coordination is promoted by empathic perspective taking (EPT). In a joint music-making task, pairs of participants rotated electronic music-boxes, producing two streams of musical sounds that were meant to be played synchronously. Participants – who were not musically trained – were assigned to high and low EPT groups based on pre-experimental assessments using a standardized personality questionnaire. Results indicated that high EPT pairs were generally more accurate in synchronizing their actions. When instructed to lead the interaction, high and low EPT leaders were equally cooperative with followers, making their performance tempo more regular, presumably in order to increase their predictability and help followers to synchronize. Crucially, however, high EPT followers were better able to use this information to predict leaders’ behavior and thus improve interpersonal synchronization. Thus, empathic perspective taking promotes interpersonal coordination by enhancing accuracy in predicting others’ behavior while leaving the aptitude for cooperation unaltered. We argue that such predictive capacity relies on a sensorimotor mechanism responsible for simulating others’ actions in an anticipatory manner, leading to behavioral advantages that may impact social cognition on a broad scale.
Highlights
Synchronous behavior is a universal means of communication and cooperation observable in diverse species[1,2,3,4]
In one study, it was reported that individuals affected by Social Anxiety Disorder are impaired in leading a task requiring interpersonal coordination[28]
The analysis of variance (ANOVA) on mean absolute asynchrony data yielded a statistically significant main effect of EMPATHY, F(1, 24) = 6.76, p = 0.02. This indicated that the high empathic perspective taking (EPT) group yielded overall smaller asynchronies compared to the low EPT group (630 ± 276 ms) (Fig. 2a)
Summary
Synchronous behavior is a universal means of communication and cooperation observable in diverse species[1,2,3,4]. When multiple individuals coordinate their movements in order to achieve interpersonal synchrony, the group benefits in terms of enhanced interpersonal bonding and social cohesion[11,12]. Such pro-social effects of interpersonal synchronization have been reported in numerous laboratory studies using a variety of tasks[13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. Even the mere observation of synchronous group behavior can augment perceived social cohesion[26,27] These previous studies demonstrated that interpersonal synchrony is a sufficient condition to boost interpersonal pro-social processes. EPT will hereby be discussed as a proxy of empathic skills relevant to social cognition in general and interpersonal synchrony in particular
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