Synchronised group singing enhances social bonding more than group conversation or recitation does: A Registered Report across 30 languages

Resumen de los autores

The evolution of music, language, and prosociality has been debated since before Darwin. The social bonding hypothesis proposes that these phenomena may be interlinked: musicality may have facilitated the evolution of social bonding beyond the possibilities of spoken language. Although dozens of experimental studies have argued that synchronised rhythms can promote bonding, methodological issues including publication bias, sample bias, experimenter effects, and appropriateness of experimental controls make it unclear whether synchronous singing reliably and generally enhances bonding relative to speaking. Following a peer-reviewed Stage 1 Registered Report protocol, we collected data from randomized controlled in-person experiments with 1,017 participants singing and speaking in groups of 5-10 in 30 diverse languages (N = 901 participants after planned quality control exclusions). Our results strongly supported all three of our pre-registered confirmatory hypotheses (all Bayes Factors > 30): (i) synchronised group singing enhances self-reported social bonding (20.9% mean increase), a significantly greater increase than (ii) group conversation (12.9% increase) or (iii) synchronous recitation (15.2% increase). Unregistered exploratory analyses suggested that perceived synchronisation and enjoyment are key predictors of social bonding, results are not artefacts of expectancy or group size, and singing’s bonding effects may be stronger in non-Western than Western contexts. Group singing may serve as a better bonding activity than speaking activities in settings such as school or workplace orientation events. Our study provides strong cross-cultural empirical evidence that music is not merely “auditory cheesecake” that is “useless” compared with language (Pinker, 1997). All forms of vocal communication increase social bonding, but group singing bonds us together over 1.5 times more on average than spoken conversation does.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Jia, Z., Ozaki, Y., Pavlovich, D. V., huang, J., Benetos, E., Khasanah, U., Calhoun, S., Chiba, G., Kitayama, Y., & Fujii, S. (2026). Synchronised group singing enhances social bonding more than group conversation or recitation does: A Registered Report across 30 languages. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/pv3m9_v6