Social Entrainment

The social entrainment model was introduced by Joseph McGrath and Janice Kelly to provide a general framework for understanding some aspects of social behavior over time. The term entrainment is borrowed from the biological sciences, in which an internal rhythmic process is “captured” and modified by another cycle. For instance, we know that there are a number of cyclic processes within the body, such as body temperature, urinary output, and various hormonal cycles, that have become entrained to one another so that they operate in synchrony with respect to their regularly spaced recurrence.

These cycles can also be affected by various outside forces that might affect their onset, offset, or synchronization. For instance, the daynight cycle acts as a powerful entraining signal for synchronizing many of the body's cyclic processes. In “free-running” conditions, or in conditions in which the outside pacing influence of the day night cycle is removed, these cycles continue to approximate a 24-hour periodicity. Thus, the circadian fluctuations will persist for a time, even after the pacing event has been removed, until disentrainment from the 24-hour periodicity occurs or until a new entraining signal is imposed. When the outside pacing event is again imposed on these processes, such as when the daynight cycle is rein-troduced, the 24-hour periodicity again becomes strongly entrained.

By analogy, the term social entrainment describes the many human social rhythms that are influenced by other social rhythms or by external pacing events. Social entrainment can also occur between individuals. For instance, some researchers have found that individuals in conversation will modify their conversation patterns toward that of their partner. At an even more macro level, there is an entrainment of life activity patterns that can become disrupted when a worker changes to an off-time shift. Social entrainment refers to all those cycles of behavior, at the individual, group, or organizational level, that are captured and modified by one another or by an external pacer that may serve to regulate those behaviors. This entry summarizes the original model and related empirical research.