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You and I as One

Any social group can be thought of as either a collection of individuals or as a single new entity with emergent, unified group behavior. When a mob forms to surge together down a street one way and then another; when a flock of birds wheels about together, closely clustered as they fly without colliding; and when an orchestra performs with highly coordinated timing, we momentarily forget about the individuals and see the collective behavior as a new, single social entity. Indeed, as Cacioppo discusses, many species seem to gather, flock, and coordinate to form such collectives. For humans there are many situations from flash mobs and sports teams to choirs and audiences, when people congregate in this way.

The drive for people to affiliate and group is not sufficient on its own to produce the coordinated behavior that emerges from such a collective. Sometimes an organizing signal, like the conductor of an orchestra, can synchronize the behavior. Other times common goals and behavioral constraints can synchronize a group, as in a flock of birds. In his chapter, Gün Semin discusses how such synchrony may be self-organizing – that is, it is achieved without intention, effort, or awareness by our social brains, even when there is no clear signal or constraint. In cases of such human sociality, the group may act as though it has a single mind. Indeed, Semin approaches this issue to relate the collective behavior as an embodied consequence of individual social forces that jointly operate to satisfy our need to affiliate, and to consider how connecting behavior through synchrony may create a collective mind.

Howard Nusbaum specifically discusses a different invisible social force that has evolved with the power to bind people into a collective—language. Language is the richest social signal that has the power to move people to act and to move groups to act together. In order for language to act as a force, it must somehow affect people with sufficient social and emotional impact. As Nusbaum discusses the impact of language, it operates at a social and emotional level similar to that discussed by Semin rather than exclusively through the inferences drawn from meaning.

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