Synchronous activity boosts compliance with requests to aggress

An experiment demonstrates that cultural practices involving physical synchrony can emotionally bind people together, making those people more likely to comply with others' requests to engage in aggressive behavior. Participants who acted in synchrony with a confederate were more likely than were participants in the asynchronous and control conditions to comply with the confederate's request to administer a noise blast to another group of participants. Increased feelings of emotional connection with the confederate mediated the relationship between synchrony and heightened compliance with the request to engage in aggressive behavior. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.