Collective rhythm as an emergent property during human social coordination Arodi Farrera1, Gabriel Ramos-Fernández1,2 1Mathematical Modeling of Social Systems Department, Institute for Research on Applied Mathematics and Systems, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico. 2Corresponding author:
[email protected] 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 to the 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 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, by imposing a temporal structure at the individual and interaction levels, interpersonal coordination in groups leads to temporal regularities that cannot be predicted from the individual periodicities: a 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. Keywords: Interpersonal coordination, Collective rhythm, Emergence, Spontaneous mimicry, Synchronization. 1. Introduction: During social activities, participants not only coordinate at the behavioral but also at the physiological and neural levels [Hoehl et al., 2020].