Synchronous singing and movement increase trust and reduce freeriding among group members.
Evidence
Do synchronous activities encourage prosocial behavior toward group members? They do. Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath had participants play what is called a common resource pool game. In this game, participants could freeride, or they could contribute to the group by suppressing their self-interest. Before playing this group economic game, participants were randomly assigned to one experimental condition or several control conditions. In the experimental condition, they sang and moved in synchrony with other group members. In the various control conditions, they sang and moved at their own pace as individuals, or listened to music without singing or moving. Results showed that, relative to control conditions, synchrony produced greater trust and greater feelings of being on the same team, reduced levels of freeriding, and caused more willingness to cooperate with other group members. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 381
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Directly supports the reader’s integration of ritual mechanisms with Norenzayan’s Big God argument; synchrony is the behavioral substrate that public rituals like the fumi-e trampling would disrupt when broken.
- ADDENDUM: Connects to the fumi-e trampling analysis: the fumi-e is a public, proscribed act that breaks synchronous solidarity — the inverse of the synchrony effect shown here.
Related
- Ritual synchrony alone generates trust and reduces freeriding among participants (similarity 0.95)
- Shared synchronous ritual synchronizes the heart rates of participants and their kin (similarity 0.83)
- Synchronous singing and movement measurably increase cooperative contributions, even in four-year-olds. (similarity 0.81)
- Religious solidarity arises from a cluster of synchrony, self-control, and Big-God mechanisms (similarity 0.81)
- Religious solidarity mechanisms extend moral concern to complete strangers (similarity 0.79)