Imagined Steps: Mental Simulation of Coordinated Rhythmic Movements Effects on Pro-sociality

Abstract

Rhythmically coordinating with a partner can increase pro-sociality, but pro-sociality does not appear to change in proportion to coordination success, or particular classes of coordination. Pro-social benefits may have more to do with simply coordinating in a social context than the details of the actual coordination (Cross et al., 2016). This begs the question, how stripped down can a coordination task be and still affect pro-sociality? Would it be sufficient simply to imagine coordinating with others? Imagining a social interaction can lead to many of the same effects as actual interaction (Crisp and Turner, 2009). We report the first experiments to explore whether imagined coordination affects pro-sociality similarly to actual coordination. Across two experiments and over 450 participants, mentally simulated coordination is shown to promote some, but not all, of the pro-social consequences of actual coordination. Imagined coordination significantly increased group cohesion and de-individuation, but did not consistently affect cooperation.

I’ll just watch: Do the pro-social effects of coordination really generalize to non-actors?

“…One reason for the differences in generalized pro-sociality seen in the Reddish et al (2014) experiments might actually be decreased generalized pro-sociality post-control. Experiment 1 of Cross et al (2017) suggested that certain control tasks might be capable of affecting cooperation in the opposite way to CRM (i.e. reducing cooperation).…”

“…The group cohesion items were taken from a similar study (Cross et al, 2017), and measured how similar and how close people felt to each other, how much they liked each other, and how much they wanted to see each other again. The participants answered all the items for each individual and for the experimental cohort as a whole.…”

“…In support of this idea, Good et al (2017) found that after coordination people are more likely to view themselves and their co-actors as a common group than as a collection of individuals. Cross et al (2017) found that similiar also applies to imagined coordination.…”

“…However, other work has failed to replicate these findings. Coordination showed no effect on cohesion despite positive changes in cooperation (Cross et al, 2016;Fessler & Holbrook, 2014Lang et al, 2017;Reddish et al, 2013), and while imagined coordination showed an effect on cohesion, this did not translate to greater cooperation (Cross, Atherton, Wilson, & Golonka, 2017). It is therefore unclear whether and how group cohesion is involved in mediating the effect of coordination on cooperation.…”

“…The weight of evidence so far does not suggest that the pro-social effects of coordination are directly mediated by group cohesion or self-other overlap, and some evidence suggests that people's self-construal may play a role (Cross et al, 2017;Good et al, 2017). Because of this, the current study took measures of all of these potential cognitive mediators, with the goal of testing a comprehensive list of proposed mediators.…”