David DeSteno

And so it becomes, it's more likely to be embraced and to be acted upon.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, there are a few things going on there.

So one, first that simple action of what's called motor synchrony, that is doing similar actions, saying similar words to other people.

If we strip that down to its barest elements, we've done that in my lab.

We bring people in and we have them listen to tones.

on headphones and they have a sensor in front of them.

We tell them, tap that sensor when you hear the tones.

And we rig it so that these two people who have never met are either tapping their hands in unison, right?

So they're in sync or it's random tones and they're out of sync.

And then to make a long story short, we have this situation we create where one of them needs help doing something.

Simply by having someone tap in time with you,

it triples the rate at which others are willing to say, you know what, I'm going to help you solve this problem.

And they report having more compassion for this person and they feel more connected to them, even though they've never ever, you know, encountered them before.

And so it's an ancient mechanism to bring people together.

But the part that I found really interesting that you mentioned is you don't know the words and, and,

It reminds me, I was talking to a rabbi once, and she was telling me that a lot of Jews know the words to prayers, but for some of the more esoteric ones, they've forgotten what they mean.

These are American Jews.

And so she went to, she was in Israel for a service, and they were starting to say some prayers, and then they stopped saying the words, and they started just using words.

nonverbal syllables to basically chant them out, kind of like, na-na-na, like that.