Comment by Animats
19 hours ago
That may be reading too much into this behavior. Watch this video of metronomes self-synchronizing.[1] That's a pervasive phenomenon. Anything with similar oscillation frequency and coupling will do this. (Including polling systems with fixed retry intervals.)
Are you sure that's not just this effect?
Yes, but aren't cultures essentially the same way - people grouped together getting influenced by each other actions and ending up learning from each other (introducing bias into individual agents), doing things together, appreciating similar stuff, talking in particular ways and so on? AFAIK, "culture" essentially means "stuff that goes in in this particular space and time".
The article hypothesized leaders and followers. That's not necessary. Drift towards the mean, plus some noise, is sufficient.
I briefly worked on synchronized applause (well, a toy discretised cellular automata-like model of such), and the individual agents don't even need to know the mean, or to receive continuous feedback (which is what happens with synchronised metronomes).
As long as they can infer a collective pace from listening to the general loudness in the room, they can do very basic adjustments to their own clapping rhythm=phase and they will get in sync.
And applause is just a stand-in for any locally periodic behaviour with regular signals (claps) which can be aggregated (more claps = louder).