The Choreography of Group Affiliation

When two people move in synchrony, they become more social. Yet it is not clear how this effect scales up to larger numbers of people. Does a group need to move in unison to affiliate, in what we term unitary synchrony; or does affiliation arise from distributed coordination, patterns ofcoupled movements between individual members of a group? We developed choreographic tasks that manipulated movement synchrony without explicitly instructing groups to move in unison. Wrist accelerometers measured group movement dynamics and we applied cross-recurrence analysis to distinguish the temporal features of emergent unitary synchrony (simultaneous movement) and distributed coordination (coupled movement). Participants' unitary synchrony did not predict pro-social behavior, but their distributed coordination predicted how much they liked each other, how they felt toward their group, and how much they conformed to each other's opinions. The choreography of affiliation arises from distributed coordination of group movement dynamics. Dance provides natural conditions for studying relationships between coordination patterns and human experience. von Zimmermann and colleagues investigate whether relatively simple or more complex forms of movement coordination are related to pro-social experiences during group dance. They find that pro-social experience depends on the degree to which movement patterns are distributed and diversified, but not the degree to which movement patterns are simply unitary.