How do Friends and Strangers Interpret Shared Experiences? Synchrony as Relationship-Bolstering or Experience-Heightening

People spend the vast majority of their waking time interacting with others, whether casual acquaintances or intimate partners (Kahneman et al. 2004; Leary et al. 1994). We intentionally spend time with friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances by engaging in joint-activities such as watching TV or shopping (American Time Use Survey; Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Government, 2003). Yet close others are not the only ones with who people share experiences. People meet and connect with strangers in social settings such as shopping malls, museums, art galleries, movie theaters, concerts, or train and plane rides. These interactions are not meaningless, either: they influence the way that people perceive those events. In the current research, we argue that shared experiences create synchrony among interaction partners, provided they can observe each other during the interaction. As people share an experience, their evaluations of that experience become entwined and co-vary with each other. This synchrony emerges due to evaluations being colored by shared emotions (Neumann and Strack 2000; Ramanathan and McGill 2007). We posit that when moment-to-moment ratings of a shared experience become highly synchronous, synchrony will have spillover effects that vary as a function of whether participants have a basis for attributing the synchrony to the relationship or some contextual feature.