You, me, and us: Maintaining self-other distinction enhances coordination, agency, and affect

Coordinating our actions with others changes how we behave and feel. Here, we provide evidence that interacting with others rests on a balance between self-other integration and segregation. Using a group walking paradigm, participants were instructed to synchronize with a metronome while listening to the sounds of 8 virtual partners. By manipulating the similarity and synchronicity of the partners' steps to the participant's own, our novel auditory task disentangles the effects of synchrony and self-other similar-ity and examines their contribution to both collective and individual awareness. We measured temporal coordination (step timing regularity and synchrony with the metronome), gait patterns, and subjective re-ports about sense of self and group cohesion. The main findings show that coordination is best when par-ticipants hear distinct but synchronous virtual others, leading to greater subjective feelings of agency, strength, dominance, and happiness.