January 28, 2009
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Barbara Isanski
(202) 293-9300
bisanski@psychologicalscience.org
Armies train by marching in step. Religions around the world incorporate
many forms of singing and chanting into their rituals. Citizens sing the
National Anthem before sporting events. Why do we participate in these
various synchronized activities? A new study, published in the January issue
of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological
Science, suggests that when people engage in synchronous activity together,
they become more likely to cooperate with other group members.
Stanford University psychologists Scott S. Wiltermuth and Chip Heath
conducted a series of experiments to see how synchronous movement affects
group interactions. In the first experiment, two groups of volunteers walked
around campus - one group was told to walk normally and the other group was
told to walk in-step. Following the walks, the volunteers participated in an
economics game that measures expectations of cooperation- the more the
volunteers cooperate, the larger the payoff they would receive at the end of
the experiment.
. In the second experiment, volunteers listened to music via headphones and
had to move cups back and forth in time to the music. The volunteers were
divided into different groups, so that some of the groups listened to the
same music and thus moved their cups in a synchronous manner. In the other
groups, the volunteers listened to music at different tempos, so their
movements were not synchronized. This was again followed by an economics
game where more cooperation would result in larger payoff. This final game
was designed so that players could put tokens in a public account, or keep
the tokens for themselves. The general economic strategy in this game is to
behave selfishly keeping one's tokens in a private account while at the same
time taking advantage of others' contributions to the public account.
The results showed that synchrony fosters cooperation- even when all of the
volunteers had financial incentives to cooperate, the volunteers from the
synchronized groups tended to be more cooperative during the games (and
ended up earning more money) than volunteers from groups who had moved
asynchronously. And even more interesting, in the last economics game,
participants from the synchronized groups were more willing to contribute
tokens to the public account, sacrificing their own money to help their
group. In addition, volunteers from the synchronous groups reported greater
feelings of being on the same team. Thus, the synchronous participants
cooperated during the games in part because they felt as though they were
part of a team.
Societies rely on cooperation among their members to thrive and be
successful. These findings suggest that cultural practices which involve
synchrony (such as dancing, singing or marching) may enable groups to
produce members who are cooperative and willing to make personal sacrifices,
for the benefit of the group. The authors conclude that "synchrony rituals
may have therefore endowed some cultural groups with an advantage in
societal evolution, leading some groups to survive where others have
failed."
###
For more information about this study, please contact: Scott S. Wiltermuth
(scwilter@stanford.edu)
Psychological Science
is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the
Institute for Scientific Information. For a copy of the article "Synchrony
and Cooperation" and access to other Psychological Science research
findings, please contact Barbara Isanski at 202-293-9300 or
bisanski@psychologicalscience.org.
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