We Mode: How Collective Joy Syncs Our Hearts, Bodies and Minds

In San Pedro Manrique, Spain, residents brace themselves to walk across a runway of glowing coals while thousands of onlookers cheer. The crowd erupts as participants cross the fire; sometimes walkers carry another person on their back. Despite the clearly different roles of walkers and spectators, both groups describe a similar, hard-to-define sense of unity — a feeling that the entire assembly becomes one.

Dimitris Xygalatas, a cognitive anthropologist at the University of Connecticut who studied the ritual, calls this experience collective effervescence. He has felt a comparable sensation in a stadium chanting with roughly 30,000 hometown soccer fans. Such moments, he says, are examples of a shared state researchers now often call "we mode."

What "we mode" feels like

"We mode" is the contagious, uplifting feeling that arises when people engage together in meaningful activity: goosebumps at a concert, the adrenaline rush during a group exercise class, or the high of a religious festival. Stanford health psychologist Kelly McGonigal describes it as "collective joy": shared positive emotions spread by expressions and movement so that smiles, laughter and energy ripple across a group.

"When you are connected through shared positive emotion, expressions often act like an aerosolized joy: you catch other people’s smiles, laughter and bodily expressions," McGonigal said.

When hearts beat as one

The idea of collective emotional arousal traces back to Émile Durkheim’s early work on cultural effervescence. Modern researchers such as Xygalatas measure these shared states with physiological tools: heart-rate monitors, electrodes and video analysis of facial expressions. Their findings show that people’s bodies can synchronize during high-arousal events.

For example, fans attending a live match often exhibit synchronized heart rates and higher endorphin levels, while fans watching the same game on television do not. Those physiological changes are linked to bonding: movement, shared emotion and physical presence strengthen social ties and support psychological well-being.

How to tap into "we mode"

McGonigal outlines practical criteria for cultivating collective joy:

• Be there in person. Physical presence preserves the subtle signals — facial expressions, breath, body movement — that create the shared state.
• Move and make noise. Cheering, clapping, dancing or singing increase arousal and help bodies align more readily than passive observation.
• Participate, don’t just watch. Letting go of self-consciousness and joining the action is essential; passive observers rarely experience the same effects.

"You’ve got to do the wave at a sporting event," McGonigal says. "If you’re at a group exercise class and the instructor asks, ‘Can I get a whoop, whoop?’ you gotta whoop, whoop." In short: shared, active participation in-person, with sound and movement, is the fastest route to "we mode."

Researchers continue to study how these shared states form and how they benefit mental and social health. The evidence suggests that rituals, concerts, sports and group exercise are not just entertainment — they are powerful social tools that help people connect, synchronize and feel part of something larger than themselves.