Overview

Researchers conjecture that rituals have been prevalent in human activities for millennia due to tacit evolutionary functions of solidarity and cooperation. A key element of ritualistic behaviours is synchrony, defined as the matching of actions in time with others. Synchrony has been associated with a range of phenomena, including increased affiliation, connectedness, and cooperation among group members. However, there have been a number of failed replications of key studies. Furthermore, synchrony research has focused mainly on social and affective responses. Synchrony's effects on cognitive processes remain largely unexamined, even though synchronous actions require social cognition. In this thesis, I investigate the link between synchrony and creative thinking, a basic and distinctively human cognitive process. This thesis reports four empirical studies conducted to investigate two main aims: (1) synthesise existing synchrony literature to determine synchrony's overall effect on previously studied outcomes; and (2) investigate the relationship between synchrony and creative thinking. The focus on creativity is theoretically relevant because both sociological speculations about synchrony's role on cultural conformity and real-world observations on reduced decision quality in highly cohesive groups (e.g., groupthink) suggest that synchrony may have detrimental effects on creativity. To address the first aim, a meta-analysis (Study 1) of experimentally manipulated synchrony studies showed that synchrony was positively associated (small to medium effect sizes) with prosocial behaviour, social bonding perceptions, partner cognition, and positive affect. Three experimental studies were conducted to address the second aim. Study 2 investigated the direct association between synchrony and two components of creative thinking - convergent thinking (i.e., synthesis of ideas toward a single creative solution) and divergent thinking (i.e., generation of multiple alternative ideas) - and aimed to replicate shared intentionality (i.e., shared goal/purpose) on positive social and affective responses.

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