Teams tend to do things
together. Soldiers march in step. Athletic teams do stretches and simple drills
together as a unit. In public schools,
all students repeat phrases together like the Pledge of Allegiance. At stadiums, fans will chant together and
make similar movements.
There is quite a bit of work that
suggests that acting in synchrony like this can increase
people’s sense of teamwork and conformity.
Why does that happen? What
happens to people watching others acting together?
This question was addressed in a
paper by Ping Dong, Xianchi Dai, and Robert Wyer in the January, 2015 issue of
the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In one study, they had a group of
participants learn a set of four basic physical exercises. Some groups performed the exercises all
together as they counted off. Other
groups performed the exercises at their own pace, so that everyone was doing
something different. In addition to
these actors, there were also observers.
Some participants watched the exercise being done. They watched either a group moving in
synchrony or a group in which there was no synchrony. After observing, actors rated how free they
felt, and observes rated how free the actors were.
As a measure of conformity, after
performing or observing the exercise, participants read reviews about products
from a number of different categories (like sofas). The reviews included information about how
popular a particular brand was. After
reading descriptions of three products for each category, participants chose
one. The measure of conformity was the
overall popularity of the products participants chose. The more popular the brands, the more that
these participants were conforming with others.
In this initial study,
participants who performed the exercises with others in synchrony tended to
select more popular products than those who performed the exercises without
synchronizing their movements with others.
Interestingly, the observers showed the opposite pattern. They were more likely to select popular products
when they observed groups who moved at their own pace rather than those who
acted together in synchrony.
Why did this happen? The observers rated that the actors were
significantly less free when they acted in synchrony with others than when they
did what they wanted to. Interestingly,
the actors who performed the exercises did not differ in how free they felt
regardless of whether they were instructed to act in synchrony or not.
This suggests that actors feel a
common bond with people when they act in synchrony. The shared goal and the shared movement create
a sense of wanting to agree with the actions of others. In contrast, the observers focused on the
individual freedom of the people. When
they watched people moving together, they were concerned about freedom, and so
they resisted picking products that other people liked.
In several other studies, the
researchers expanded on this point. In
one study, for example, the actors who were told to move in synchrony were told
that they were part of a competition in which they would win a prize if their
team moved together most effectively.
The group of actors that moved independently was not given these instructions. The observers were told that they were
judging the synchrony of the team they were watching for a competition. Some of the observers were told that if their
team won, they would share in the winnings, so that the observer became part of
the common goal of the team.
Finally, at the end of the study,
participants were given an opportunity to donate money to one of six
charities. Three of the charities were
well-known and the rest were not well-known.
The amount of money given to well-known charities was the measure of
conformity in this study.
Overall, actors who moved in
synchrony tended to give more money to well-known charities than the observers
who watched them. However when the
observer was also made to feel part of the team, the observer gave more money
to well-known charities than to unpopular charities. As in the previous study, actors who did not
move in synchrony did not have a bias to conform: they gave about the same
amount of money to popular and unpopular charities.
Putting these findings together,
when a group moves in synchrony, it increases their sense of belonging to a
group and increases the willingness of members of that group to conform with
others. Observers have a different
experience. Watching others move in
synchrony makes observers sensitive to the loss of freedom of those moving
together. Those observers are actually
less wiling to conform as a result of watching the movements.
In this way, synchronous movements
are a double-edged sword. They increase
a sense of belonging in those who are made to feel part of the team, but they
actually decrease that sense of belonging to those who see themselves as
outsiders.
