Interpersonal synchrony affects performers’ sense of agency

ABSTRACT

We investigated if interpersonal synchrony can lead to a sense of agency over another’s movement (extended self-agency). In Experiment 1, we found that extended self-agency was greater during synchrony than asynchrony. However, we also found that synchrony boosted participants’ sense that the other performer had agency over their actions (extended other-agency). This finding may have been because synchrony created a sense of distributed agency. If so, then manipulating the degree of influence participants have over their partner’s behavior should boost extended self-agency when leading and extended other-agency when following. Experiment 2 confirmed these predictions. We also found synchrony created a sense of joint-agency. These results show how interpersonal synchrony can modulate a core aspect of the self.

KEYWORDS:

• Synchrony
• self
• agency
• joint action
• coordination

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Ai Jia Gwee, Brenda Low, Chew Yun Ping, Elissa Lim, Goh Chun Aik, and Luan Ling for help with the experiments.

Disclosure statement

There are no known conflicts of interest.

Supplementary materials

Supplemental materials data can be accessed here.

Notes

1. We repeated all analyses with sex as an additional factor to check that the fact we varied the confederate with the sex of the participant did not affect our results. The only significant interaction with sex we found was a marginally significant agency direction by sex interaction, F(1,90) = 3.43, p = .067, η_p² = .037 for this ANOVA; however, the more critical three-way interaction of agency direction by sex by condition was not significant, F(3,90) = 0.48, p = .700, η_p² = .016 .

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund [R-581-000-207-115]; Advanced Grant from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [694986]; Economic and Social Research Council [RES-060-25-0085]; John Templeton World Charity Foundation [TWCF0164].