Competition for social influence is a major force shaping societies. But should one align with competitors when striving for maximum social influence, or strategically misalign? Applying game theory to a scenario where two advisers compete for a client, we find that the rational solution for advisers is to report truthfully when favored by the client, but to exaggerate or blatantly lie when ignored.

Beyond the quality of research that was produced in sports sciences over the past two decades regarding player’s interpersonal coordination, there is still a gap concerning how a set of player’s can temporarily behave as a single entity, that is as an interpersonal synergy. This gap may be due to a lack of methods that can accurately relate player’s interpersonal coordination with a performance goal. During the last years we dedicate our research efforts aiming to adapt a concept called Uncontrolled Manifold Hypothesis (UCM) which revealed as an useful tool to characterize interpersonal synergies in rugby union, badminton, and football.

The cognitive demands of navigating large groups comprised of many varied, intense, and enduring social bonds are thought to have significantly shaped human brain evolution. Yet, much remains to be understood about how individuals track, encode, and are influenced by the structure of the social networks that they inhabit. This talk will provide an overview of recent work integrating theory and methods from social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and social network analysis, as well as the motivation for combining these lines of inquiry.

Effective teamwork relies on coordination that spans different modalities, time scales, and changes over time. To do complex work, coordination patterns may arise and dissipate across team members’ behavior, knowledge, language, physiology, and technology. In this talk, I discuss the team coordination dynamics approach that explicates important properties of coordination, several methods for studying them, along with some empirical examples. I conclude with ideas and examples from ongoing projects that describe how we can advance the scientific understanding of the time-varying properties and functions of multi-modal team coordination.

Neuroscience research has produced tremendous insight into how the human brain supports learning and social dynamics. Still, laboratory-generated findings do not always straightforwardly generalize to real-world environments. In an effort to bring social neuroscience research out of the lab into everyday social contexts, I collaborate with scientists, artists, and educators to (a) conduct hyperscanning research during naturalistic face-to-face communication, and (b) develop inter-brain synchrony neurofeedback applications to boost social engagement.