@article{ref1,
title="The effects of synchrony on group moral hypocrisy",
journal="Frontiers in psychology",
year="2020",
author="Lang, Martin and Kundt, Radek and Chvaja, Radim",
volume="11",
number="",
pages="e544589-e544589",
abstract="Humans have evolved various social behaviors such as interpersonal motor synchrony (i.e., matching movements in time), play and sport or religious ritual that bolster  group cohesion and facilitate cooperation. While important for small communities,  the face-to-face nature of such technologies makes them infeasible in large-scale  societies where risky cooperation between anonymous individuals must be enforced  through moral judgment and, ultimately, altruistic punishment. However, the unbiased  applicability of group norms is often jeopardized by moral hypocrisy, i.e., the  application of moral norms in favor of closer subgroup members such as key  socioeconomic partners and kin. We investigated whether social behaviors that  facilitate close ties between people also promote moral hypocrisy that may hamper  large-scale group functioning. We recruited 129 student subjects that either  interacted with a confederate in the high synchrony or low synchrony conditions or  performed movements alone. Subsequently, participants judged a moral transgression  committed by the confederate toward another anonymous student. The results showed  that highly synchronized participants judged the confederate's transgression less  harshly than the participants in the other two conditions and that this effect was  mediated by the perception of group unity with the confederate. We argue that for  synchrony to amplify group identity in large-scale societies, it needs to be  properly integrated with morally compelling group symbols that accentuate the  group's overarching identity (such as in religious worship or military parade). Without such contextualization, synchrony may create bonded subgroups that amplify  local preferences rather than impartial and wide application of moral norms.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="1664-1078",
doi="10.3389/fpsyg.2020.544589",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.544589"
}