Everything but the Kitchen Sync: A Review and Case Study of Interactional Synchrony on the Job Interview

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Akin to schools of fish navigating away from predators in a seamless fashion (Parrish et al., 2002), or flocks of birds moving in a unified pattern throughout the sky (Okubo, 1986), coordination can be detected in almost all aspects of human activity. For example, this phenomenon can manifest when the neurological activity of individuals becomes interdependent during a conversation (Hasson & Frith, 2016; Sievers, 2020) or when the physiological activity, such as the heart rate, of two or more interacting individuals becomes aligned (Palumbo et al., 2017). The focus of the present chapter, however, will be to introduce and discuss the concept of human interactional synchrony, which is defined as the “degree to which individuals’ behaviors during an interaction are nonrandom, patterned, or synchronized” (Bernieri & Rosenthal, 1991, p. 403).