Say you’re mingling at a cocktail party, networking event, singles mixer or church reception. Some exchanges are pleasant enough. Others are taxing, if not downright painful. Then you get lucky and meet someone with whom you feel an instant connection. The conversation feels effortless. You find yourself saying things like “Yes!” and “Exactly!” The encounter is affirming, uplifting, and fundamentally why you attended the event in the first place.
You find yourself saying things like “Yes!” and “Exactly!”
The peculiar alchemy that causes us to click with some people and not with others—romantically or platonically—has been a preoccupation of poets for centuries, but it has only recently drawn the attention of scientists. Advances in biometric and brain-scanning technology have given researchers startling new insights into what occurs when we socialize. Not only do we tend to mirror each other’s movements, postures, facial expressions and gestures; we also uncannily sync up our heart rates, blood pressure, pupil dilation and hormonal activity. During meaningful conversations, there is an associated syncing, or coupling, of neural patterns or brain waves. You and the other person are, at that moment, of like minds.
Neuroscientists call such coordinated movement and autonomic activity “interpersonal synchrony.” You can think of it as a kind of Spidey sense that flags whether someone is friend or foe—not to mention sexually compatible. “What we’re talking about is a much older, evolutionary, more animalistic way of understanding the social world,” says Dr. Eliska Prochazkova, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cognitive Psychology Unit of Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Indeed, it seems we are wired to perform a kind of deep-seated method acting in social situations, “using information that doesn’t need to be taken into consciousness, thought about, or inferred,” Prochazhkova says. By subconsciously mirroring even the subtlest twitches of expression and biological rhythms of other people, we can channel their thoughts and feelings. When we reflexively smile upon observing someone else’s joy, we feel their happiness. When we flinch as someone else gets hit, we feel their pain. Syncing with their racing heartbeat makes us feel their anxiety. The downside is that we can sometimes get so swept up in other people’s drama, anger or fear that we lose sight of where others end and we begin.
So what to make of all this? Given the dynamic, subconscious and autonomic nature of interpersonal synchrony, we should all probably give ourselves a break if, unlike Will Rogers, we cannot claim to like everyone we meet. While we should all try to be courteous and get along, part of maturity is realizing that you won’t click with everyone. And that’s OK. In fact, it’s the natural order of things. That’s why when you do click with someone, it’s so special and you should pay attention and cultivate that relationship.
Too often people spend time with friends or frenemies out of habit, convenience or social positioning, perhaps drinking too much or laughing too loud to mask the lack of synchrony. Or they just don’t think about how people make them feel, which we now know goes well beyond emotional effects. To greater or lesser degrees, we become the people with whom we socialize.
“If I’m syncing with you, my prediction error is minimized,” says Dr. Oliver Saunders Wilder, an interpersonal synchrony researcher affiliated with MIT’s Affective Computing Group. When we are out of sync, he says, we experience it as a kind of judder or twinge of social discomfort which “is your brain working a little harder to fix predictions that are wrong.” As a result, the interaction feels, and actually is, more laborious.
While not everyone has great emotional awareness, most of us can readily distinguish between someone who is “hard to be around” versus “easy to be around.” In the latter case, you and the other person are literally on the same wavelength. But you can also sync too much—such as when your spouse’s stress makes you feel stressed, and together you climb a ladder of agitation until there is an epic blowup leaving you both confused over how things spun so horribly out of control.
The trick in these situations is to become aware of how you might be unwittingly mirroring the other person’s anger, outrage or anxiety, and in effect snap out of it. Easier said than done, because when we embody another, their emotions and tensions truly feel like our own. But if you can catch yourself, doing things as simple as deepening your breathing, changing your posture and relaxing your facial and shoulder muscles can help change the rhythm of the encounter. In many cases, the other person will pull back, too, and maybe even start syncing to you.
Synchrony researcher and psychotherapist Dr. Richard Palumbo advises imagining there is a MUTE button during particularly fraught interactions so you focus less on the words used and more on the other person’s level of arousal and how you might be matching that energy. ”It’s your natural human tendency to sync with someone else,” he says. “What’s not so natural is being aware of it.”
Sometimes we need to disconnect to recalibrate and reclaim ourselves. The relationships that endure, however, are the ones where you are in sync more than you are not. Grace is learning to ride the tide.
This essay is adapted from Kate Murphy’s new book,“Why We Click: The Emerging Science of Interpersonal Synchrony,” which will be published by Celadon Books on Jan. 27.
