🏟️ How Shared Rituals Strengthen Social Bonds
New research on soccer fans shows how social rituals trigger extensive emotional synchrony
One of the most powerful ways to build social bonds with other people is to share experiences with them. We often do this by going out for drinks, sharing food, attending a concert, or dancing together. These activities encourage joint attention and synchronized action, which helps to bring people together.
High energy and emotion often amplify the effects of social bonding. A great example of this is when fans of a particular sports team come together in a shared space to watch their team play. As it turns out, the most meaningful social moments during these activities may not happen during the drama of the game itself (e.g. scoring points), but rather before the sport even starts.
New research shows that shared pregame rituals between fellow sports fans stimulate intense emotional synchrony. These findings reveal a new perspective on how social bonding accumulates during large-scale gatherings in sports and beyond.
⚽️ The science of synchrony in sports fandom
In a 2025 study published in PNAS, researchers investigated how shared rituals impact emotional synchrony among fans of a Brazilian soccer club. Their focus wasn’t just on the match, but on a dramatic pregame fan ritual called Rua de Fogo (“Street of Fire”)—a high-energy gathering involving chanting, clapping, fireworks, and flares as fans welcome the arrival of the team bus.
To measure emotional alignment, the researchers outfitted 17 fans (and one team bus driver) with wearable ECG sensors to continuously track heart rate. This physiological measure was used as a proxy for emotional arousal. With an analysis technique known as Multidimensional Recurrence Quantification Analysis (MdRQA), the researchers looked for dynamic patterns of synchrony across multiple individuals in the group over time.
They divided the entire experience into several periods including:
Rua de Fogo ritual (34 minutes)
Pregame waiting period (71 minutes)
The soccer game itself (103 minutes)
Halftime and a neutral baseline period for comparison
The researchers calculated several synchrony metrics including recurrence (how often fans’ heart rates aligned), trapping time (how long they stayed aligned), entropy (complexity of alignment), and determinism (predictability of synchrony over time).
So what did the analysis show?
The Rua de Fogo ritual triggered the strongest and most dynamic emotional synchrony, outperforming most of the soccer match itself.
Fans not only aligned emotionally, but they stayed in those states for longer (higher trapping time) and showed more complex, varied emotional responses (higher entropy).
Interestingly, even the bus driver—who wasn’t physically participating in many of the activities—showed heart rate synchrony with the crowd as the bus passed through the ritual space.
The actual football match produced less intense and less sustained synchrony patterns, but it did show sharp, transient peaks during dramatic moments such as goals.
These results show that high-energy social rituals like Rua de Fogo create collective emotional states through shared movement, sensory overload, and amplified group identity. The doesn’t just hype people up with an adrenaline boost; it actively brings their physiology into states of synchrony for an extended time.
This type of emotional alignment has been linked to increased group bonding, social identity, and cooperation. Shared rituals can make even total strangers feel deeply connected.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
#1. Shared rituals build strong bonds
The match might be the main event, but the real magic often lies in the moments of social connection that happen beyond the game. If you want to build stronger social bonds—whether in teams, communities, or events—focus on ritualized experiences that engage the senses and create a shared emotional build-up.
#2. Add small rituals to existing social routines
Rituals work well when they’re frequent and familiar, so you don’t need to wait until a major event. Find ways to incorporate small rituals into existing dynamics in your life. You could light a candle before dinner with family, go for tea with workout buddies after yoga, or introduce a short social game for your video calls with friends. Repeating small actions together can strengthen connection.
#3. Create happy rituals at work
Social bonds with work colleagues are important for team health, collaboration, and productivity, and creating shared rituals for team events can support those social bonds. It could be as simple as playing a fun song at the start of team meetings, or setting up a regular social game on Fridays for team members. Just find small, predictable social activities that people can synchronize over at work.
“It is nothing against the validity of a friendship that the parties to it have not a mutual resemblance. There must be a basis of agreement, but the structure reared upon it may contain a thousand disparities.”
~ Henry James