The rhythm of rapport: Interpersonal synchrony and social perception

By L. Miles, Louise Nind, C. N. Macrae. 2009

394 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The temporal coordination of behavior during dyadic interactions is a foundation for effective social exchange with synchronized actions enhancing perceptions of rapport and interpersonal connectedness. What has yet to be established, however, are the precise characteristics of behavioral coordination that give rise to such effects. Informed by a dynamical systems approach, the current investigation considered whether judgments of rapport are influenced by the mode of interpersonal synchrony. In two experiments, participants rated the degree of rapport manifest by a simulated pair of walkers exhibiting various configurations of synchronized strides. The results revealed that the highest levels of rapport were associated with the most stable forms of interpersonal coordination (i.e., in-phase and anti-phase synchrony), regardless of whether coordination between the walkers was conveyed via the presentation of visual (Expt. 1a) or auditory (Expt. 1b) cues. These findings underscore the importance of interpersonal coordination to core aspects of social perception.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16b5b392544a62c96fe3e47d785383bb9f6fc0ff

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Citations in the corpus

Psychological research on joint action: Theory and data (2011, background): “More recently, Miles, Nind, and Macrae (2009) demonstrated that people judge the connectedness of individuals in a dyad based on the perceived synchrony of their movements.”
If They Move in Sync, They Must Feel in Sync: Movement Synchrony Leads to Attributions of Rapport and Entitativity (2011, background): “In addition, we provide empirical support for the theorized interplay between movement synchrony, attributions of rapport, and entitativity by manipulating movement rhythms in Experiment 1 and by manipulating the attributions of the observer in Experiment 2, providing further insights into the proce”
The antecedents and consequences of human behavioral mimicry. (2013, background): “…and obedience (Wiltermuth 2012b); improves memory for information provided by and about an interaction partner (Macrae et al. 2008, Miles et al. 2010b); increases pain thresholds (Cohen et al. 2010); and engenders judgments of entitativity (Lakens 2010, Lakens & Stel 2011, Miles et al. 2009).”
From Mind Perception to Mental Connection: Synchrony as a Mechanism for Social Understanding (2012, background): “The connection between physical synchrony and social connection is also a proportional one: the greatest levels of rapport are found with the most stable forms of interpersonal synchrony (e.g., walking in-phase and anti-phase; Miles et al., 2009).”
Does synchrony promote generalized prosociality? (2014, result): “This result contrasts with the findings of Valdesolo and DeSteno (2011), Wiltermuth and Heath (2009), and others (Hove & Risen, 2009; Lakens, 2010; Miles et al., 2009), who reported higher perceived entitativity, similarity, rapport, and trust with synchrony.”
Moving memories: Behavioral synchrony and memory for self and others (2010, background): “In particular, we suspect that social connections founded on interpersonal synchrony (Hove & Risen, in press; Macrae et al., 2008; Marsh, Richardson, & Schmidt, 2009; Miles et al., 2009; Schmidt & Richardson, 2008), although temporary, may also impact memory performance.”
How does it feel to act together? (2014, background): “"=! raining, the people in a park may spontaneously converge on the kiosk that affords protection from the rain.”
Interpersonal Synchrony: A Survey of Evaluation Methods across Disciplines (2012, background): “A link has also been established between the degree of synchrony and how dyadic partners are perceived [49].”
Synchronization in a goal-directed task: Human movement coordination with each other and robotic partners (2011, background): “In social psychology synchronization is furthermore acknowledged to lead to the attribution of more positive characteristics to an opponent [7] and is known to increase rapport in different situations of daily life such as teacher-student relation [8] and mother-child-bonding [9].”
Synchrony as an Adaptive Mechanism for Large-Scale Human Social Bonding (2016, neutral): “People also report perceived synchrony to be an indicator of social closeness between people for both basic sounds (Miles et al. 2009; Lakens & Stel 2011) and musical stimuli (Hagen & Bryant 2003), suggesting that the tendency to associate synchronisation with social behaviour is well engrained.”