Towards a Psychology of Coordination: Exploring Feeling and Focus in the Individual and Group in Music-making.

Abstract

Organizing involves unifying the work of many into the work of a whole group or organization. This occurs through the continuously adaptive performance of coordination by individuals within a group. Although how individuals act on behalf of the group is shaped by what is perceived by their minds and senses, we know little about what group members focus on and feel while coordinating. Two studies examined individual attention and feeling in groups coordinating their efforts to make music. I chose group music-making as a setting to explore these issues because it exhibits attention and feeling in uniquely observable ways. In Study 1, I used a four-group experimental design to study how a focus on attention to self, to other and to the self-in-relation-to-other affected the quality of coordination for individuals performing a group song-composition task. In Study 2, I used the ethnographic methods of participant-observation and qualitative interviewing to examine the primacy of feelings or aesthetics in how individuals coordinate sounds as they sing as a choir. Both studies revealed that individuals coordinate with others based on their perceptions of either “parts” or “wholes” through attention and feeling. Experimental groups in which members displayed more attention to others in relation to attention to the self were more responsive than groups in which members displayed more attention to the self. Groups with more responsive members were judged to have higher coordination quality, and reported more feelings of the group working as a substantive whole. The experiences of singing as a choir revealed that performers use the aesthetic or feeling of beauty, as well as attention, to coordinate. Performers know whether to maintain or adjust their efforts based on experiencing the desirable, beautiful cohesive whole of a fine performance (high quality coordination), or the discomforting, poor-quality fragmentation of a poor performance (low quality coordination). The choir’s conductor also shaped both performers’ attentional focus and use of beauty as a standard for coordination. Together, the studies reveal how the work of individuals is at once the work of the group, and how both cognitive and aesthetic knowledge shape coordination.