Abstract
Although interpersonal coordinative activities have been shown to produce prosocial effects in both adults and children, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. While most approaches focus on the effect of mimicry and synchronous behavioral matching, we hypothesize that temporal predictability might play a central role in producing prosocial effects, as it directs coordination and might therefore strengthen shared intentionality. In a percussion task with pairs of 5-year old children, we manipulated temporal predictability and movement similarity/predictability between the pair’s movements. Temporal predictability was manipulated by instructing the pair to play the instruments either to beats that were evenly-spaced, and therefore predictable, or to beats that were random, and therefore unpredictable. Movement similarity/predictability was manipulated by having the pair play rhythmic patterns that were similar, predictable, or independent from each other. Children who played to predictable beats were more willing to solve problems cooperatively with their partners and to help when their partners had an accident. In contrast, there was no positive effect of rhythmic predictability or similarity. These results are the first to show that temporal predictability affects prosociality independent of movement similarity or predictability. We conclude that the predictable time frame commonly seen in coordinative activities may be key to strengthening shared intentionality and producing prosocial effects.
Highlights
The ubiquity of cooperating, helping and sharing distinguishes human societies from those of other primates, and is arguably what makes human societies so successful in the animal world [1,2,3,4]
Playing percussion instruments to consistent, even-spaced beats increased prosocial behaviors in five-year-old children, regardless of whether the rhythmic patterns were similar to or predictive of one another. This indicates that temporal predictability might be a central contributor to prosocial effects of music activities and other similar forms of interpersonal coordination, beginning in early childhood
Children playing to predictable beats could always predict the onsets of each other’s movements, and this predictivity alone could increase attention to each other and elicit feeling of connection
Summary
The ubiquity of cooperating, helping and sharing distinguishes human societies from those of other primates, and is arguably what makes human societies so successful in the animal world [1,2,3,4]. Prosocial behavior can be effectively enhanced by interpersonal synchrony [13,14,15,16,17] In both adults and children, synchronous social activities such as singing, dancing and joint music making increase social bonding and facilitate subsequent cooperation and helping [15,18,19,20,21,22,23]. Similar effects are found with synchronous movement in non-musical contexts In both adults and children, walking, tapping fingers, clapping hands and rocking chairs in synchrony have all been found to have affiliative effects, thereby enhancing prosociality [13,16,17,27]. Spontaneous synchrony in body movements during natural interactions is correlated with higher positive emotions, and it is likely that synchrony is playing a causal role [29]
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