Bouncing With Babies
This article has mind-blowing, yet intuitive results that tell us a lot about human relationships.
When we move in sync with someone, or they move in sync with us (humans sometimes call this “dancing”), we are more likely to be altruistic toward that person later.
In this experiment, researcher “A” held a baby in a front-facing baby carrier and bounced them to a musical beat.
They were face to face with researcher “B,” who was bouncing in sync with researcher A and the passive baby.
Later, they put the baby down near Researcher B, who “accidentally” dropped an object.
The baby spontaneously helped by picking up the object.
When the researchers repeated this with researcher B bouncing out of sync with the baby, the baby did not help researcher B pick up the object.
They repeated this with 48 babies.
The ones who were matched in their bounce by researcher B were significantly more likely to help pick up the dropped object.
We are made of relationships, and those relationships are made through resonance of speech, movement, and even brain waves (measured by EEG).
When people mirror us, we love them (maybe just a little bit).
Of course, adults are more complicated. We can’t just bob our heads with someone and become partners in crime.
But our personalities are built on top of these basic tendencies to monitor physical rhythm and value synchronization.
We’re still those babies deep down.
The context of the mind is the body. What we think and feel is tightly linked to how we move, and what moves us.
We feel warmth (love?) for people who mirror us, and we mirror people we love.
Feeling connected to other people is the greatest possible human feeling, and its most innate form is simple physical resonance, as when dancing together.
Just as evolution keeps things that work, so do our personalities.
Who we are as adults is an evolution of who we were as children. We kept all the things that worked, changed a few things that really didn’t, and added some fancy phrases like “non sequitur.”
The lesson from our bouncing babies is that what we do with our bodies makes up our minds. A little bit of resonance goes a long way.
In these times of enforced COVID isolation, it’s important to find ways of linking up with the people who “bounce” with us.
We can bounce together on video, right? We can dance. Shall we dance?
Read the article here (there’s pictures of the baby setup too).
