Let's Meditate Together, it's good for you and it'll create world peace!
But what's really going on?
Synchrony and Cooperation
From Wiltermuth and Heath, slightly edited:
The decline of the bayonet and the advent of the machine gun have made
marching in step a terrible, if not suicidal, combat tactic; yet
armies still train by marching in step. Similarly, religions around
the world incorporate synchronous singing and chanting into their
rituals. Why? We suggest that acting in synchrony with others can
foster cooperation within groups by strengthening group cohesion. The
widespread presence of cultural rituals involving synchrony may have
evolved as partial solutions to the free-rider problem, the tendency
for some individuals to shoulder less than their share of the burden
of producing public goods and participating in collective action.
Their abstract:
Armies, churches, organizations, and communities often engage in
activities—for example, marching, singing, and dancing—that lead group
members to act in synchrony with each other. Anthropologists and
sociologists have speculated that rituals involving synchronous
activity may produce positive emotions that weaken the psychological
boundaries between the self and the group. This article explores
whether synchronous activity may serve as a partial solution to the
free-rider problem facing groups that need to motivate their members
to contribute toward the collective good. Across three experiments,
people acting in synchrony with others cooperated more in subsequent
group economic exercises, even in situations requiring personal
sacrifice. Our results also showed that positive emotions need not be
generated for synchrony to foster cooperation. In total, the results
suggest that acting in synchrony with others can increase cooperation
by strengthening social attachment among group members.
Some description of the experiments:
In the first experiment an experimenter led 30 participants (60%
female; mean age = 20, SD= 2.0) in groups of 3 on walks around campus.
In the synchronous condition, participants walked in step. In the
control condition, they walked normally. After their walk,
participants completed a questionnaire designed to convince
participants that they had finished the experimentIn an ostensibly
separate experiment, a second experimenter conducted the Weak Link
Coordination Exercise, which models situations in which group
productivity is a function of the lowest level of input...the game
measures expectations of cooperation.
In a second experiment groups were randomly assigned to one of four
conditions: In the control condition (i.e., the no-singing, no-moving
condition), participants (American students) listened to O Canada,
held a plastic cup above the table, and silently read the lyrics to
the anthem. In the synchronous-singing condition, participants
listened to the anthem, held the cup, and sang the words O Canada at
the appropriate times. In the synchronous-singing-and-moving
condition, participants listened to the anthem, sang the words O
Canada, and moved cups from side to side in time with the music. In
the asynchronous condition, participants sang and moved cups, but
participants each listened to the anthem at a different tempo, causing
them to move their cups at different rates and sing O Canada at
different times. Participants in all conditions were told that they
might hear the same or different versions of O Canada, but only
participants in the asynchronous condition actually heard different
versions. Participants in the two synchrony conditions cooperated more
in the subsequent Weak Link Coordination Exercise described in Study 1
than did participants in the control or asynchronous conditions.
The third experiment used the same synchrony, asynchrony, and control
groups as the second to show that after behaving in synchrony with
others, people contribued more to a public account in a commons
dilemma known as a public-goods game. Moving in synchrony boosted
cooperation even when behaving cooperatively conflicted with personal
self-interest.
