Interpersonal coordination in interactions: Evaluations and social skills

Interactional synchrony and behavior matching is a fundamental, and often taken for granted, aspect of communicative situations. The level of interpersonal coordination exhibited during an interaction can vary depending on who is talking to whom. However, little empirical attention has been devoted to determining how people interpret the degree of coordination during interactions and what skills are associated with interactants who are more or less “in‐sync”; with their interaction partners. Using a sample of conversations between members of the same and different cultures, this preliminary study examined how interpersonal coordination is evaluated and the relationship between interpersonal coordination and social skills. The findings suggest that interpersonal coordination is a desirable and positively evaluated characteristic of interactions. The results further indicate that more socially skilled communicators can help facilitate interpersonal coordination in interactions.