Music is a powerful social tool, and people tend to feel closer to others who share their music preference. Social bonding through music, however, often unfolds without explicit knowledge of others’ tastes. The present study tested whether shared music preference can promote social bonding during passive listening, even in the absence of such knowledge. Ninety-six English-speaking Canadian undergraduate students were assigned to 24 four-person groups and listened to a playlist of either Western pop or K-pop. Within each group, all participants were either fans or nonfans of the genre they heard, resulting in four crossed conditions: Western pop fans, Western pop nonfans, K-pop fans, and K-pop nonfans. Social bonding was indexed through pre–post changes in interpersonal liking and perceived closeness, alongside measures of mood, cooperation (via a public goods game), and group movement synchrony derived from motion capture. Relative to nonfans, fans showed significantly greater increases in liking (small effect) and closeness (small-to-medium effect) from pre- to postlistening, as well as acceleration-based movement synchrony (medium-to-large effect) during listening. Exploratory mediation analyses indicated that movement synchrony accounted for the fan-group advantage in interpersonal liking, whereas increases in positive mood mediated the fan-group advantage in perceived closeness. No significant differences were found in cooperation. Together, these findings suggest that shared music preference can shape social bonding during passive listening, even without explicit awareness of others’ preferences, potentially through coordinated movement and changes in affective state.
