This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Sometimes, while people are interacting with each other, their movements and physiological responses can fall into step. Some past studies have linked synchronized bodily responses to cooperation and being attuned to the emotions of others.
A common way of detecting physiological synchrony entails measuring people's skin conductance, or in other words, how easily small electrical currents pass through the skin. This measure reflects the activity of sweat glands, which can become more active when people are more aroused, physically active or stressed. Researchers at Leiden University and Utrecht University recently set out to further explore the link between skin conductance synchronization during face-to-face interactions and cooperation.
The results of their experiments, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggest that matching bodily responses are not always associated with greater reciprocity (i.e., giving something back in response to receiving something) and cooperation. "Physiological synchrony is a very fascinating phenomenon: when we interact with somebody, our physiologies (such as our heart rate or our pupil size) somehow start to move in sync," Fabiola Diana, first author of the paper, told Phys.org. "The mechanism behind this is still unknown, but this happens all the time—between mothers and their children, between romantic or friend couples, between therapist and patient." Some past research focusing on physiological synchrony suggested that greater synchrony is associated with people feeling more "connected" or attuned to each other.
This could in turn promote trust, reciprocity and cooperation. "Since trust is the very backbone of human society, and many daily life situations require us to put our trust in complete strangers (e.g., asking someone to look at your purse while you are going to the bathroom), our primary objective was to research whether this synchrony could also be one of the reasons why people who do not know each other trust one another," said Diana. "Another thing we were interested in is how people synchronize.
Is there maybe something in the faces of people that makes us synchronize more?" To dive deeper into the link between synchrony and cooperation, Diana and her colleagues recruited 122 participants and ran a simple experiment. The participants were paired up with complete strangers and fitted with several electrodes to measure their physiological signals. The electrodes they used could monitor the participants' heart rate and their skin's electrical conductance.
Throughout the experiment, the team also recorded the participants' facial expressions using cameras. In some experimental trials, pairs of participants could see each other, while in others they could not. "We then asked them to play the so-called 'trust game,' a very simple laboratory version of everyday trust: one person takes a risk by giving something valuable to another person, who then decides alone whether to repay that trust," explained Diana.
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