Moving as one: Agency and social unity in joint action and its breakdown

Joint action can take many forms: whereas rowers synchronise their movements, dancers often engage in closely coordinated complementary action. Even in martial arts, fighters closely coordinate their movements in an effort to understand and control their opponent’s movements. In joint actions such as these, the possibilities for action require multiple agents to partake in the social system, as the joint action cannot be enacted by an individual alone. Although most people have an intuitive understanding of what it means to experience having an impact on one’s environment, this paper is particularly concerned with providing a formal understanding of agency in a social system where control within the social system is distributed over multiple agents. The central question is: how do agents experience social unity in situations in which the individual actions cannot be understood separately from the behaviour of the system as a whole? In this paper, we combine insights from social and ecological psychology and behavioural dynamics to propose a theoretical framework on how joint action affects the experience of agency and social unity. Using empirical examples from rowing, dance and martial arts, we discuss how determining the link between psychological states during coordination and accidental or intentional breakdowns (in cooperative failure or combative success, respectively) provides insights into fundamental debates about the nature of joint action (Butterfill, 2012; Gilbert, 1996; 2000; Marsh, Johnston, Richardson, & Schmidt, 2009a; 2009b; Sebanz, & Knoblich, 2009a; 2009b).