The Magic of Synchronization

Cooperation is critical for teamwork, relationship establishment and maintenance. Cooperation requires mutual and continuous adjustment of the individuals within a group in real time. When a couple knows how to cooperate with each other, they are more likely to find a means to achieve joint goals together. When a team can work cooperatively, they are better at working together to problem-solve and to fulfill project goals. Often, the relationships between people in a group affect how well people cooperate with each other. A lot of the daily challenges in relationships and teamwork lie in finding effective ways to cooperate. A recent study showed that a type of shared experience between two people could promote cooperative behaviors that allows them to achieve goals together.

A study done by Dr. Rabinowitch looked into how synchronized motion experiences shape children at 4 years of age on their late joint task completion (Rabinowitch and Meltzoff, 2017). In this study, the researchers asked whether sharing synchronized motion experiences would increase the efficiency to complete the tasks that require cooperative behaviors between two children. Three groups of children were studied: 1) the synchronous group; 2) the asynchronous group; and 3) the baseline group. Across all three groups, children were paired up. In the synchronous group, each pair of children first sat on two separate swings next to each other, and then were swung at the same rate. In the asynchronous group, the children also sat on the swings that were next to each other, but this time, they were swung at different rates. The children in the baseline group were not swung.

After this swing experience, two cooperative tasks took place. In the first task, the paired children sat at a table with two buttons on the table; a screen showing a white square was in front of them. Children’s task was to push the buttons at the same time, which then revealed a puppet that popped up from the box on the screen to indicate their success. In the second task, the paired children worked together to pass an object from one side of the table to the other via a hole on a table. The table was specially designed, so one child could only reach the hole from the top of the table and the other child could only reach the hole from the bottom of the table. For the button-push task, the researchers measured the number of unsuccessful button pushes prior to the first successful button push. For the object-passing task, the researcher measured how fast the paired children successfully passed an object from one side to the other. The idea is that for the pairs that are better at cooperation, children are more likely to achieve the tasks faster.

The researchers found that the children in the synchronous group were better at both tasks in comparison with the children having the prior asynchronous motion experiences and the children who had no motion experiences. Even more, they found that the children in the synchronous group were more likely to lift their hands prior to the button push to signal to each other that they were going to push the button. And this hand-lift gesture was correlated with their button-push task performance. These findings reveal that shared synchronized experiences not only facilitate children’s cooperative behaviors, but also foster them to develop a means to communicate with each other that enhances the precision of the cooperative behaviors required for successful task completion.

Now you have gained this gold knowledge for cooperation. How could you leverage this knowledge to strengthen your personal relationships and professional team-building? Moving together could be a good answer for you. As we talked about last time, synchronization plays a key role in partner dances, while also posing one of the biggest challenges in partner dances. Synchronization between two people requires both parties to pay attention to each other and make constant adjustments based on their perception of the other person’s movements. In activities like partner dances, which involve continuous movements, this cycle repeats as you dance with your partner. As a result, the adjustment is dynamic instead of a one-time event. This constant adjustment requires tremendous attention and practice.

Try it yourself! Stand up right now; find a partner, it could be your significant other, your friend or a colleague of yours. Give yourselves 5 mins to try the following exercise - find a space that you guys can move 3 steps forward and backward without getting anyone injured. Then, hold each other’s hands, try to step forward and backward “together”. I mean it! Try to synchronize your movements with your partner - “Move Together!” If you find it awkward and challenging at the beginning, you are not alone. You are likely to step on each other’s toes, or bump into each others’ heads because both of you try to step forward at the same time. It’s okay! Keep trying until you both find a shared groove and get to the point where you feel that click - the moment where you can feel each other and move together without any verbal cues. After you reach that point and stay there for a little longer, try to see if you can change direction and move left and right this time. When you both have enjoyed enough of those synching moments, take a moment to reflect and ride with that momentum to visit the challenges that you might have had earlier in your relationships or projects. See if you two can find a new common ground and a different perspective to work together.

Try it and tell me about your success!