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In March 2016, CrossFit gym owner Brandon Bergeron received notice that the property housing his gym in Grass Valley, California, had been sold. He needed to vacate the premises immediately. Devastated, Bergeron let his members—who had become a community by lifting, squatting, and sweating together—know. They responded to the news by showing up with three pickup trucks and a U-Haul to help Bergeron move out. As he told a reporter for the local paper The Union, “A whole gym that took three years to build, every nut and bolt was gone in eight hours.” When he found a new location two months later, the community turned out again to help rebuild the gym.
One of the side effects of collective joy—along with the elation, ecstatic harmony, and affection heralded by anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown—is cooperation. Because synchronized movement increases trust, it encourages us to share and help out. Studies show that after walking in step with someone, tapping to the same beat, or even just moving a plastic cup side to side in unison, people cooperate more in an economic game, sacrifice more to benefit the greater good, and are more likely to help a stranger. Even babies show this effect. When fourteen-month-olds are bounced to music, facing an experimenter who bounces in sync, they are more likely to later help that experimenter pick up dropped markers. In some basic and primal way, when we move together, we tie our fates together, and we become invested in the well-being of those we move with.
Anthropologists believe that this may be the most important function of collective joy: to strengthen the social ties that encourage cooperation. Some liken it to the social grooming of chimpanzees, baboons, and gorillas, who pick ticks and fleas off one another, brush away dirt, and work out tangles in fur. Such grooming is not primarily about hygiene or appearance. It’s a way to bond. The social touch leads to an endorphin rush that strengthens the animals’ relationship and leads to real alliances. Primates who groom one another are more likely to share food and defend one another during a conflict.
Endorphins are especially effective at strengthening ties to individuals we are not related to. This is true not just in other primates, but also among people. Repeated exposure to endorphins while in the company of others builds an extended family. We humans have our own forms of social grooming, including shared laughter, singing, dancing, and storytelling. (Anthropologists think this is the likely order that these social behaviors first appeared in human history.) All of these activities release endorphins, and because you can laugh, sing, dance, and tell stories with many people at once, these group forms of social grooming make it possible to build large social networks with less time invested. And that’s a good thing, because humans thrive when our social networks are broad and diverse.
Across cultures, most people’s social networks can be described by five widening circles of connection. The first, innermost circle typically has only one other person in it, a primary life partner. The second circle contains close family and friends, with an average of five members. These are the people who would be devastated if something happened to you and would make significant sacrifices to help you. The next circle is the core friendship circle. It includes, on average, fifteen people who play an important role in your life. You would invite these friends or family members to special gatherings, and you could comfortably call on them for favors. The next circle includes fifty or so individuals that you could describe as friends, but have less close ties to. The outermost circle contains about one hundred and fifty people you are connected to in more casual ways at work, in your local community, through organizations you belong to, or by the activities you participate in.
It is the outer two circles that are most likely to get populated and strengthened through the social grooming of collective joy, whether through synchronized movement, singing, or shared laughter. And these outer circles, when robust, provide the kind of social support that can keep us going in small but meaningful ways. Kimberly Sogge of the Ottawa Rowing Club told me that the way rowers attune with one another on the boat translates into a quiet but effective community of mutual care. “When someone’s in trouble, just like when you’re rowing, you don’t announce it, but somehow the message gets communicated and people start doing things. The farmer will bring honey or kale. People really notice each other and what you need appears.”
Émile Durkheim believed the collective effervescence experienced in religious activities was one of the core social functions of church. It helped to create communities committed to group life. Modern religious scholars note that fitness communities have come to serve a similar role for many. Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston, fellows at Harvard Divinity School, observed CrossFit communities across the United States. They concluded that the local gyms, called “boxes,” were functioning like community hubs, similar to places of worship, where people looked out for one another. CrossFit regulars drove fellow members to medical appointments, delivered meals to members whose spouse or close relative was sick, and even raised money, or helped find work, for members in need.
I heard one such account from Caroline Kohles, the senior director of fitness and wellness at the Marlene Meyerson Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. Kohles teaches Nia, a movement form that integrates dance, martial arts, and yoga. One of Kohles’s regular Nia students, Susan, had recently lost her husband, Henry, after fifty years of marriage. Susan decided to honor Henry’s wishes by not having any formal burial, ceremony, or memorial. Kohles told me, “He was cremated, and without that ritual, she was left sitting home alone. I went to visit Susan and told her, ‘When you come back to class, we will do a special class in his honor.’” Henry loved classical music, so Kohles started putting together a playlist of pieces they could dance to: Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” the molto allegro from Mozart’s Symphony no. 14, Vivaldi’s Concerto in E Major, “Spring.”
The day Susan returned, about two weeks after Henry passed, it happened to be a student’s birthday. Another woman in class was celebrating her son’s marriage. These are all things Kohles would usually acknowledge. She remembers thinking, How do you honor a wedding, a funeral, and a birthday in one class? She chose to play “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers as the last song, and asked the group to form a circle. Kohles first invited the birthday woman to come into the center to be celebrated. Then she called in the woman whose son was getting married, so the group could share her joy. Finally the entire class held hands in the circle and placed the memory of Henry in the middle. “We swayed, pulsed, held hands, lifted our hearts and hands up, and sent Henry off on his final journey.” Afterward, a group of students honored Susan and Henry with an impromptu shivah. They purchased coffee, fruit, and breakfast rolls, and listened as Susan told stories about her life with Henry. “We’ll take care of Susan,” Kohles said. “We’ll make sure she comes to the gym and support her as she reenvisions her life.” When I checked in with Kohles more than a year later, she shared that Susan still comes to class regularly. Every once in a while, Kohles plays Henry’s classical music playlist, always in honor of Susan and Henry.
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For much of human history, the size and membership of your social network was limited by geography. Now family can be halfway around the world, and through technology, we can connect with strangers anywhere on the planet. As our social circles widen and disperse, it’s worth asking: Is it possible to experience collective joy at a distance—moving at the same time, if not in the same place—to create a community that is not bounded by proximity?
The Exertion Games Lab, a research group at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, designed the Jogging over a Distance app to connect two runners in different locations. The users talk by phone as they jog, and the app uses each runner’s GPS to determine their pace. When you keep pace with your partner, their voice sounds like they are right next to you. If you run faster, the app makes their voice sound like it’s coming from behind you. In this way, the app encourages runners to syn
ch up. (You can also use heart rate to calculate pace, so that “in sync” is determined by effort, not objective speed.) The spatialized audio feedback creates a more realistic sense of running side by side than simply chatting over the phone. As one early user of the technology said, “I felt like he was there with me.”
Other technologies connect users to a much bigger community. Jennifer Weiss, a forty-eight-year-old orthopedic surgeon in Southern California, rides her Peloton stationary bike in her garage at five-thirty most mornings. The bike connects her to as many as eight hundred riders around the world through a video app, which streams a live workout from Peloton’s New York City studio. The app also sends data about Weiss’s performance to the instructor and a community leaderboard, where every rider is listed according to their bike’s speed and resistance. When Weiss is near someone on the leaderboard and sees their place rise and fall in relationship to hers, it feels like she is physically riding with them in a pack. When the instructor tells participants to ride to the beat of the music, Weiss knows that riders all over the world are cycling at the exact same cadence. This part of the ride reminds her of the feeling she gets in a flow yoga class when everyone is moving and breathing in unison.
In both of these cases—Jogging over a Distance and the livestreamed Peloton classes—technology enables genuine connection. But technology can also be used to simulate social interaction. The same Exertion Games Lab that built the Jogging over a Distance app also created Joggobot, the world’s first robotic jogging companion. Joggobot is essentially a surveillance drone. You tell the robot in advance what path you plan to run, and it uses GPS to follow that route. You wear a T-shirt with a target on your chest so that the quadcopter’s camera can detect you. Joggobot watches you run and flies ten feet ahead to keep you company. In early tests of the device, joggers quickly embraced the robot as a running mate. They easily and instinctively humanized the quadcopter, interpreting its whirring noise as a sign of exertion, as if Joggobot were breathing hard and struggling to keep up. When sensor errors or wind made Joggobot veer off course, the joggers interpreted it as “having a mind of its own.”
How to think about this? If your primary goal is to harness the human desire for companionship to make exercise more enjoyable, Joggobot is genius. But what if authentic social connection is the true need, and being active is a way to fulfill it? You could argue that anyone who craves connection would reject Joggobot and join a running group or head to the local YMCA. But it can be intimidating to show up in a new space. Rather than take that risk, maybe you would decide to go for a walk with your drone or settle for a virtual reality glove that rapidly compresses to makes it feel like you were just high-fived by a workout partner.
Bronwyn Tarr has recently replicated her dance experiments in virtual reality, and when people dance with an avatar, they like the avatars who dance in sync with them more than the avatars who do their own thing. They also experience the same increases in pain tolerance as people dancing with other humans in a shared physical space. These results suggest that virtual reality can give you the same endorphin rush as authentic social synchrony. I admit that this finding surprised me. Then again, it’s probably part of why, growing up, I had such a positive response to exercise videos. It also helps explain why dance video games that require you to synchronize with an avatar are so popular. They tap into a very real neurochemical reward. Virtual reality will make the illusion of synchronized connection even more convincing—and yet I’m left feeling ambivalent about that progress. If collective joy evolved as a form of social grooming, those endorphins aren’t released just to make you feel good. They’re supposed to nurture important relationships and help you develop a social support network. When you move with an avatar or a robot, what relationship does that endorphin rush benefit?
Technology that exploits our social instincts won’t necessarily provide the same benefits as the experience it mimics. When my sister’s twin daughters were born two months premature, she and her husband moved into the neonatal intensive care unit. Among the many events they missed, they couldn’t make a 10K trail race they had registered for. Their running group picked up their race bibs and talked the organizers into handing over the medals my sister and her husband would have received if they had finished the race. The running group sent them the bibs and medals and said, “Go run a 10K wherever you are.” As my sister recalls, “We pinned on our bibs, ran a 10K around the hospital, wore the medals the rest of the day, and sent photos to the group. It was a time in our lives when everything was out of control and so overwhelming. We felt very embraced by the runners who did that for us.” Do I even need to pose the rhetorical question of whether Joggobot would be there for them in the same way?
I don’t pretend to know where the line lies between authentic connection and simulation. These are questions the fields of artificial intelligence and virtual reality are grappling with, as sex robots and caregiver robots and pet robots become feasible alternatives to their carbon-based counterparts. Soon we’ll all have to decide where our own line is, and in domains far more intimate than jogging buddies. As we are pushed in every aspect of our lives toward technological connectivity as opposed to shared space and direct contact, activities that put us in the physical presence of others may become increasingly rare and especially important. Even people who enjoy bonding over technology need close-to-home connection. I couldn’t help but smile when Peloton enthusiast Jennifer Weiss told me that she bought a second bike so that her husband can ride alongside her. Some of her favorite rides are when their three young kids join the two of them in the garage and dance to keep them company.
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When William H. McNeill was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941, the Texas base he arrived at was undersupplied. For the first six weeks, each recruit had only one set of fatigues, producing a memorable stench. And although McNeill was training to become an antiaircraft artilleryman, the base had only a single nonfunctioning antiaircraft weapon for the entire battalion. McNeill’s training officers struggled to fill the time on base with useful activities. They ordered the recruits to pick grass around the barracks by hand (one of the many supplies they lacked was a lawn mower). The officers also made the men in training march for hours in close formation. McNeill’s first impression of these drills was “a more useless exercise would be hard to imagine.” His view shifted, however, the longer they marched under the hot sun, their boots stomping dust and gravel, and their voices shouting Hut! Hup! Hip! Four! “Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved,” McNeill wrote in his 1995 book Keeping Together in Time. “A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life.”
Psychologists call this sense of empowerment through joint action we-agency. McNeill coined the term muscular bonding to describe how physical activities like marching and synchronized labor produce we-agency. When we move in unison, we become willing and able to give our all to a collective aim. After McNeill left the military and continued his career as a historian, he came to believe that the we-agency achieved through muscular bonding has been a source of military strength throughout history. The Aztecs, Spartans, and Zulus all used ritualized dancing to train young warriors, and European armies practiced close-order drills to build “a hunting band sociability” that would shore up soldiers’ solidarity and commitment in battle.
McNeill’s insight points to a second social function of synchronized movement. It isn’t just about helping individuals build friendship networks. It’s also about building a tribe that can defend its territory, pursue common goals, and face large threats together. Physician Joachim Richter and psychologist Roya Ostovar have speculated that early humans might have developed synchronized movement as a defense tactic, to “delude a predator by producing the impression of being a homogeneous enor
mous animal which would be too powerful to attack.” This idea is not so farfetched. Many species deploy strategies of synchronized defense. Pilot whales and dolphins swim and surface in unison to intimidate outsiders. Yellow-rumped cacique birds protect their eggs from predators by forming a mob around the invader, diving at and pecking the predator until it flees. When muskoxen are surrounded by wolves, they pack themselves together tightly, horns facing out, to become a multiheaded beast, an impenetrable herd. Human groups moving in unison can produce a similarly daunting effect. In one psychology experiment, participants rated the formidability of groups of soldiers based only on the sounds of those groups approaching. In some of the audio recordings, the footsteps were synchronized; in others, the steps were not. When participants heard synchronized steps, they imagined the soldiers to be physically stronger and bigger. The synchronized groups were also perceived as more unified, no longer separate individuals but a single entity—a kind of superorganism—with an elevated capacity to fight.
Any group moving in unison is seen by others as united in purpose, connected by shared values, and acting as one. But as William H. McNeill observed while marching in basic training, this is not just an observer effect. Those in the group feel more powerful, too. When people move together, they view external threats as less fearsome and their opponents as less intimidating. This may be one reason why the Andaman Islanders performed dance rituals before a fight with an outside group. It’s also part of why political and social movements organize marches. The collective movement not only demonstrates the strength of its coalition to outsiders but also bolsters the morale of its members. Studies of real-world marches and demonstrations confirm that participating in these events generates feelings of we-agency. Active participants—but not those who observe from the sidelines—describe feeling connected to the group and part of something bigger than themselves. Marching also makes participants more hopeful. After the event, they are more likely to agree that the world is becoming more just, that human nature is more good than evil, and that the problems they are protesting are solvable. Importantly, watching these events is not enough to produce these effects. You must join in.
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