William S. Condon

William S. Condon is a researcher who investigated human interactions. He developed the concept of situation synchrony.

In the 1960s, William S. Condon pioneered the study of social interactions at the fraction-of-a-second level. In his famous research project, he scrutinized a four-and-a-half-second film segment frame by frame, where each frame represented 1/25th second. After studying this film segment for a year and a half, he discerned interactional micromovements, such as the wife moving her shoulder exactly as the husband's hands came up, which combined yielded microrhythms.

Cultural references
In Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 book, The Tipping Point, he cites Condon's research to help explain why some "Salesman" types may contribute more to word-of-mouth cultural 'epidemics'.

Some other reference is made in Flora Davis's book "Inside Intuition-What we know about Non-Verbal Communication" published in New York by McGraw-Hill Books. Which talks about the study he did on Interactional Syncrony.

Works

 * Condon, W. S. (1996). Sound-Film Microanalysis: A Means for Correlating Brain and Behavior in Persons with Autism. Proceedings of the 1996 Autism Society of America National Conference, Milwaukee, WI, July 1996, 221–225.
 * Condon, W. S. (1985). Sound-Film Microanalysis: A Means for Correlating Brain and Behavior. In Frank Duffy and Norman Geschwind (Eds.), Dyslexia: A Neuroscientific Approach to Clinical Evaluation, Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 123–156.
 * Condon, W. S. (1974) Cultural Microrhythms. In M. Davis (Ed.), Interaction Rhythms. New York: Human Sciences, 1982.
 * Condon, W. S. (1971). Speech and Body Motion Synchrony of the Speaker-Hearer. In D. L. Horton and J. J. Jenkins (Eds.), Perception of Language, Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 150–173.
 * Condon, W. S. (1974). Multiple response to sound in autistic-like children. Proceedings of the National Society for Autistic Children Conference, Washington, DC, June 1974.
 * Condon, W. S. and Sander, L. W. (1974). Neonate movement is synchronized with adult speech. Integrated participation and language acquisition. Science 183:99.
 * Condon, W. S. (1963) Synchrony units and the communicational hierarchy. Paper presented at Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinics, Pittsburgh, PA