ABSTRACT
In a ery plane crash in early August 2005, people evacuated the burning plane in about two minutes and as a result no lives were lost. In an editorial in the New York Times, one researcher wrote in an op-ed piece (Fischhoff, 2005),
As this example illustrates, coordinated action among strangers can emerge on-line, spontaneously, in response to demands of the situation, with no planning and little ability to strategize. Fundamental to this chapter is an understanding how such action is possible, and how we might best understand how individuals spontaneously form a cooperative unit to complete an action. That we are pulled to help others even when it may put ourselves at some risk implies that a pull toward others is rather fundamental to our social nature. Less obvious aspects of this example, however, are also informative about “sociality,” or the pull toward connectedness with others. In particular, the example illustrates how much of our cooperation and coordination is “self-organized,” that is, emerges out of basic ongoing dynamical processes rather than mediated by top-down, strategic processes. For goal-oriented tasks, even one as simple as taking a walk together,
becoming a “plural subject” of action involves a simultaneous binding of wills (Gilbert, 1996). Some research discussed in this chapter, however, implies that the fundamental pull toward others can also be manifested in more mundane ways that are not goal driven. That is, individuals’ tendency to coordinate even incidental movements with those around them-to move one’s rocking chair in sync with another’s, for instance-may well speak to the nature of sociality (see Marsh, Richardson, & Schmidt, 2009). In escaping a burning plane, although the situation urgently presses upon the victims the goal of escaping an enclosed, increasingly dangerous space safely, the swift accomplishment of this involves important perception and action processes neglected in social psychology. Individuals must automatically attend to the movements of those around them, and respond on-line in a synchronous or complementary fashion. Crucially, the perception of unfolding events and other’s movements jointly determine and, conversely, are determined by, the perceiver’s actions. This kind of view rather notably emphasizes overt behavior (e.g., embodied cooperation; Richardson, Marsh, & Baron, 2007) but, as well, body motion that may seemingly have only biological, not social, signicance (Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007; Fowler, Richardson, Marsh, & Shockley, 2008; Schmidt & Richardson, 2008).
