Top-Down To Bottom-Up: Rhythmic Synchrony Relaxes Social Priors to Enable Change

Abstract (slightly edited) of an article by Connor Wood and accepted for publication in Brain and Behavioral Sciences: Interpersonal synchrony, such as dancing to a shared rhythm, elicits bonding and rewards, leading many to see it as a mechanism for group cohesion. Synchronized activities also reduce ingroup bias, rapidly bond strangers, flatten hierarchies and blur roles, and evoke trance…