Paper short abstract:

As a ritualised behaviour that brings people together in shared space and time, dance appears to serve a social bonding function with may have evolutionary value. This study investigates the contributions of shared experience and synchronisation of movement to the social bonding effect of dancing.

Paper long abstract:

Dance may serve a social bonding function as a ritualised behaviour that brings people together in shared space and time. Previous research has suggested that the social bonding effect of dance may be due to synchronised movement, however they have mostly involved highly controlled laboratory settings, in which participants engage in simple periodic movements like finger tapping. From the perspective of embodied music cognition, dance is more than just synchronisation to music, but may also involve expression of emotion and creativity in a shared space. Both the sharing of emotional expression and synchronisation of movement may lead to social bonding, and may be important features in the anthropological study of dance as a ritual.

To attempt to distinguish between time and space, this study utilised a silent disco experimental paradigm. Participants danced in pairs while wearing headphones, allowing timing of the music to be manipulated between within the pair, to force them to dance either in or out-of-time with each other. It was found that pairs experienced a greater sense of affiliation while in the synchronous condition, compared to an asynchronous condition in which one was consistently a quarter-beat out of phase. This self-reported result was supported by behavioural measurements recorded in motion capture. The present study suggests that, although the exact nature of dance movements may change, timing is everything in dance. Implications for our understanding of the evolution of ritual will be discussed.