Systems and Signals for Social Coordination
How do we understand each other as people? Do we take people at their word, or do actions speak even louder? When moved to affiliate and to act in concert with other people as a group, we need to understand the communications and actions of others. Language can move us to action even across great distances but how does it do so? While we can observe the behavior of groups
of people as coordinated, the mechanism
of achieving this coordination is unseen. We may be driven socially to form groups but how does that drive function in the individual to cause us to cohere. In order to go beyond the observation and experiences we have with groups and group behavior, we need to understand what makes the engine of social connection run. At one level, we can talk about language as a force itself, as Howard Nusbaum does. We can talk about the synchronization of individual behavior as Giin Semin does. However, both of these are observations about the way individuals may become part of a group. To go beyond this we must look to our biology to understand how the
machinery underneath our sociality leads
to connected minds.
Semin suggested one way our brains may seek to connect. Some neurons in an area of the brain that is involved in the control and planning of our actions also respond when we observe actions we have performed. Such neurons might be thought to “resonate” when seeing someone act or speak with our own experiences.
Neurons that mirror actions and behavior
have been thought to play a role in the process of understanding that behavior and the social connection that may form
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as aresult of the resonance. In the next essay, Steve Small discusses these neural mechanisms and how they may be important in helping us understand spoken language and possibly in understanding social behavior.
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