The Secret of Riot Cops’ Confidence?

It’s the province of riot cops, marching
bands, and Hitler youth, not to mention a few millenia of
militaries. And its effects—perhaps not so surprisingly—extend far
beyond organization or pomp and circumstance. According to a new
study from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA),
marching
in unison could actually shape men’s estimations of their own
and others’ physical prowess. 

“We have found that when men are walking in step with other men,
they think that a potential foe is smaller and less physically
formidable and less intimidating than when they’re just walking in
no particularly coordinated manner with other men,” said
anthropology professor and lead study author Daniel Fessler. “That
calculation appears to make men who march with other men feel less
vulnerable and more powerful and their potential foe more easily
vanquished.” 

“Simply walking in sync may make men more likely to think,
‘Yeah, we could take that guy!'” Fessler said. 

For their experiment, Fessler and co-author Colin Holbrook—whose
findings are published online in the journal Biology
Letters—recruited 96 undergraduate men at UCLA. Half were
instructed to walk in lockstep with a partner, while another half
were asked to walk alongside a partner but without moving
uniformly. Afterward, the students took several tests, “most of
them to disguise the real purpose of the study” and one that
involved looking at a photo of a man with an angry expression.
Participants were asked to estimate the angry man’s height and pick
his build from a roster of six silhouettes of various heights and
muscularity. 

Young men who had walked in unison with their partners wound up
judging the man as significantly shorter and smaller than those who
had walked normally. On average, they guessed him to be about an
inch shorter than the other group of participants did. The
researchers note that while the difference in perception was
relatively small, the association was consistent enough that
there’s only a 0.01 chance of it being a fluke. 

Fessler and Holbrook suggest that humans evolved, quite
logically, to view moving in unison as a sign of group strength.
“The ability to move in unison indicates that one is part of an
effective fighting alliance,” said Fessler. “That’s no accident. In
order for individuals to be synchronized, they have to be motivated
to coordinate their behavior—they have to be paying attention to
what one another are doing, and they have to be skilled and
competent. A deep part of our brain registers this
connection.”