SC16 – Joint action, interpersonal coordination, and coordination devices such as work songs

Lecturer: Thomas Wolf
Fields: Social cognition, interpersonal coordination

Content

Humans are social animals and achieve remarkable things when they coordinate. Coordination in time and space however is not always as easy as it might seem. Joint action research aims to understand the cognitive mechanisms involved in social coordination.
In this course we will look at different types of interpersonal coordination, their underlying mechanisms, some effects of coordination and various physical and non-physical devices which support coordination. We will focus on how work songs, such as sea shanties, support the coordination of physical effort.

Literature

Lecturer

Thomas Wolf studied musicology and cognitive science at the University of Vienna, before completing his PhD in cognitive science at the Central European University, Budapest. Currently he is a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Mind and Body (SOMBY) Lab at the Central European University, Vienna, where he directs the SOMBY MusicLab. Embedded in the larger fields of social cognition and joint action, his research interests center around temporal coordination in social interactions, which he investigates through experiments conducted on joint music-making.

Affiliation: Central European University, Vienna
Homepage: https://www.thomaswolfmusic.com