Encourage Your Brain: How to Get People to Cooperate

This Encourage Your Brain tip has to do with how to get people to cooperate. So there are several studies that show that people are twice as likely to cooperate if they've experienced some form of behavioral synchrony. And behavioral synchrony simply means that our behaviors match or mirror one another. And those synchronies can help reduce sort of negative attitudes in the brain and cause us to see commonalities as opposed to differences with one another. Examples would be walking in stride with one another on the same foot, singing a song in unison, tapping the same beat out to a piece of music together. And in fact, in one study, strangers were partnered together, they listened to a piece of music on headphones, and they were asked to tap out the beat together on the table. So these two strangers, partners, are noticing that each other is doing the same thing. And then another group was asked to partner together and listen to a different piece of music and also tap out the beat that they heard. So in this case, they're not tapping in unison, there's not the behavioral synchrony. And the ones who tapped in synchrony were 49 times— excuse me, 49% more likely to volunteer to stay after the experiment and help their partner stranger with a set of math problems, whereas the ones that didn't tap in synchrony, only 18% of those offered to stay and help with the math problems. So that behavioral synchrony really was evidence that people will cooperate and even self-sacrifice for strangers in that situation. So the practical application— how do you apply that concept, especially when we're so often working on Zoom and we don't have the chance to be together and get out and walk and step or do some of these things together. So a few tips: you can encourage everyone to use hand movements together. I think I talked a couple of weeks about— ago about how showing your hands reduces the sense of threat or stress together. So everybody in your Zoom, if you ask them to, you know, let's do kudos, show us your hands, do this little finger thing together, and that's fun to see on the Brady Bunch Zoom session. You could also use emoticons for that as well. You could also ask people to sing together if you look for an opportunity. Let's say maybe somebody's birthday has come up and you can sing together happy birthday. That's fun. Ask the people to join you in a stretch break, like, "I need a stretch, join me in a stretch break," and again, now you've got that physical behavioral synchrony happening. You can watch a short video clip together. So I just played in our leadership coaching class this morning a 90-second Simon Sinek little video clip, and then that's fun. So everybody's experienced something similar together and then can share. And final example is to ask people to come to your Zoom meeting with maybe a hat that represents their mood or color that they're going to wear that represents their mood, something that just everybody's doing the same thing. And all of that will kind of increase that social bonding and reduce some of the negative attitudes that the brain is always watching for threats and differences. So you get the idea. Expand on that list. Find and, you know, try out some fun things and see what happens in your world in terms of cooperation.