Interpersonal Synchrony Over a Distance - the Effect of Network Noise on Synchronization and its Prosocial Consequences

Interpersonal motor synchronization (IMS) occurs when people move together, in temporal alignment. Being in IMS can result in prosocial effects: increased liking, similarity and trust. We address the possibility of remote IMS (rIMS) between people who are not co-located, through mobile phone interactions. A threat to rIMS is the temporal noise inherent to communication networks. We created a mobile phone application in which a human participant tries to tap in synchrony with a remote participant, that is in fact a responsive computer algorithm. We introduced three levels of synthetic network noise to the joint tapping. We show that pro-sociality can be created in rIMS, but that as network noise increases the prosocial effects decrease. Participants’ textual answers are analyzed thematically to learn about the effects of remote synchronization. Our findings motivate the creation of remote interactions with elements of IMS as well as inform the network requirements for successful rIMS.