On June 11, 2018, Aafke van Mourik Broekman will defend her thesis, in which she shows that we have the ability to internalize a sense of solidarity from the groups we observe. This does not only change how we feel about the group expressing the solidarity, but can also alter our behaviour and our relations with other people around us.
A few years ago, an unlikely collaboration between social psychologists from the University of Groningen and choreographers from Random Collision began. Understandably, you might wonder why choreographers and social scientists would want to. It all started when we discovered a shared interest in the social impact of dance: “How do dancers move their audiences?” “When do passive viewers become involved?” Together we set up a research project to investigate these questions.