Abstract

Social groups are dynamic. They constantly reorganize themselves at multiple spatiotemporal scales. What principles of interaction allow social groups to be fluid? Are there regularities amidst the incessant mutation? I will address these questions with a series of experimental and theoretical results on social coordination in middle-sized groups. The results are based on the “Human Firefly” experiment, where a group of eight people coordinated their movement by controlling and viewing a ring of flashing LEDs. In the experiment, we observed social coordination in an intermittent and recurrent form – individuals temporally bond with each other, split, then return to that bond repeatedly. The time scale of each bond depends on the difference between individuals’ natural movement tempo. As we experimentally controlled the diversity of tempos, we created intermittent bonding at various time scales, inducing the group to assume a great variety of configurations sequentially. Intermittent bonding also permits multiscale organizations of the social group – when macroscopically the group segregates into two subgroups, members can nevertheless commute across groups at the microscopic level. Theoretical modeling further shows that such fluid, multiscale social coordination requires a balance between diversity and sufficiently weak social coupling. How these findings connect existing empirical and theoretical work on coordination in dyads and large ensembles will be discussed.