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 of coupled movements between individual members of a group? We developed choreographic tasks that manipulated movement synchrony without explicitly instructing groups to move in uni- son. Wrist accelerometers measured group movement dynamics and we applied cross recurrence analysis to distinguish the temporal features of emergent unitary synchrony (simultaneous move- ment) 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.