Thomas Wolf

Thomas Wolf studies how people coordinate their actions. His research investigates joint action, rhythmic coordination, and the cognitive mechanisms that allow people to predict, adapt to, and stabilize one another’s behavior. He combines ethnographic work in the field with controlled experimental work in the lab to examine coordination in everyday, artistic, and physically demanding settings. This includes research on work songs and work calls as practical tools for organizing collective effort, as well as work on musical improvisation as a model case of creative joint action. Across these lines of work, he asks how rhythm, vocalization, and interactional dynamics help people coordinate while remaining flexible and responsive to one another.