Collective Rhythm as an Emergent Property During Human Social Coordination

Abstract

The literature on social interactions has shown that participants coordinate not only at the behavioral but also at the physiological and neural levels, and that this coordination gives a temporal structure to the individual and social dynamics. However, it has not been fully explored whether such temporal patterns emerge during interpersonal coordination beyond dyads, whether this phenomenon arises from complex cognitive mechanisms or from relatively simple rules of behavior, or which are the sociocultural processes that underlie this phenomenon. We review the evidence for the existence of group-level rhythmic patterns that result from social interactions and argue that the complexity of group dynamics can lead to temporal regularities that cannot be predicted from the individual periodicities: an emergent collective rhythm. Moreover, we use this interpretation of the literature to discuss how taking into account the sociocultural niche in which individuals develop can help explain the seemingly divergent results that have been reported on the social influences and consequences of interpersonal coordination. We make recommendations on further research to test these arguments and their relationship to the feeling of belonging and assimilation experienced during group dynamics.

Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Crowd Sound Dynamics

“…Schiavio, Maes, and van der Schyff, 2022) can be expanded to study the dynamics of less scripted behavior, such as the dynamics of crowd behavior at sporting events. Farrera and Ramos‐Fernández (2022) describe a phenomenon of emergent collective rhythm (like the collective “wave”) as the emergence of “group‐level rhythmic patterns” that result from the self‐organization of social behavior through entrainment and synchronization (Farrera & Ramos‐Fernández, 2022). This social behavior is characterized by “context‐specific interactions” and mutual “fast adaptation to other group members” actions' (Demos & Palmer, 2022).…”

Local and global rhythmic dynamics in small-group conversations

“…Thus, they contain information on the time elapsed between the beginning of one voiced segment and that of the next (inter-onset interval). In this way, the time series obtained from the individual and group audios represent, respectively, the individual and collective acoustic rhythms (Farrera & Ramos-Fernández, 2022).…”

“…In addition, group-level dynamics such as synchronization (simultaneous patterns) and alternation (sequential patterns) can spontaneously arise from the pattern of rhythmic interactions (Green eld et al, 2021; Ravignani et al, 2014). Moreover, a collective rhythm (Farrera & Ramos-Fernández, 2022), that is, the coarse-grained temporal pattern that results from these rhythmic interactions, can exhibit periodicity (isochrony) even when this property is not found in the rhythm of single individuals, analogous to the ashing patterns of Plotinus carolinus re ies (Sarfati et al, 2021).…”