Chapter 6°
The Suspension of Individual Consciousness and The Dissolution of Self and Other Boundaries
When we watch a group of soldiers marching in formation, we see the behavior of the group synchronized. Although we can make out the
6 The lead author is Gtin R. Semin, Ph.D., an Academy Professor, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He is the founding Scientific Director of the Kurt Lewin Graduate School , a past president of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Chair of the International Committee of the Association for Psychological Science. Semin’s research is primarily driven by an interest in communication, social cognition as jointly recruited process, and language and the diverse uses that language can be put to in social interaction (ranging from the regulation of prejudice to that of interpersonal relationships) as well as the embodied grounding of meaning and communication.
A puzzle that has occupied Semin much of his career is how it is possible to understand social behavior by explaining individual processes. Another puzzle has been why one should focus on stills when human behavior is a movie: behavior is self evidently dynamic and highly responsive to contextual variations. Finally, Semin has been puzzled by how tt is possible to think that all there might be to psychological processes 1s some symbolic computation taking place somewhere between the ears. As outlined in this essay, he has come to conceptualize the social in terms of jointly recruited processes rather than individual ones, social behavior as situated, and psychological processes as embodied.
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individual within the group, the group seems to be an entity of its own and the individual soldier seems to have become a cog in the social machine. Mob behavior, crowds at sporting events, and soldiers in formation all suggest that when we are organized to act together, the group becomes an emergent entity that can submerge the sense of the individual self. This apparent social absorption stands in contrast to our typical experience of being autonomous, self-aware agents in the world. The dissolution of the boundary between the self and the group is one manifestation of the social brain and the mechanisms that support our ability to connect with others.
Although not everyone has the experience of marching in a band or running with a mob, most people have been part of an audience at a concert or play. At the end of a particularly thrilling performance, an audience can be moved spontaneously as a group to clap wildly. In these situations, we know the feeling of surging to our feet as a collective, hands clapping and faces beaming with approval. As the clapping blooms, individual clappers merge into a synchronized unit.’"* Similarly, thousands of individual sports fans have been observed to stand and raise their hands in a synchronized fashion to produce a collective wave that travels around the stadium. In both cases, individual people act as a collective unit, a superorganismal structure, with capacities and behaviors beyond the reach of any single individual in the group.
These examples are instances of behavioral uniformity in large groups. What is distinctive about these examples is that the observed behavioral synchrony can be understood in terms of
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