Mimicry

What it is

People in conversation tend to line up with each other. They adopt a similar posture, match the pace of speech, reuse each other's words and, in the case that matters for emotion, copy each other's facial expressions. Researchers call the copying of movement and expression mimicry and distinguish it from deliberate imitation, where one person copies another on purpose, and from conformity, where the thing copied is a judgement.

The term has a wider reach than the best-known paper on it. Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh gave the territory its popular name, the chameleon effect, in 1999, and the vault holds a separate page for that specific paper and its claim that the copying is automatic. Mimicry as a phenomenon was documented earlier and has an evidential base that does not depend on that paper. Facial mimicry has its own literature, and a 2004 paper by van Baaren and colleagues showed that being mimicked raises prosocial behaviour. A meta-analysis of 26 contrasts from experiments in which a confederate imitated the participant, published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, found that being mimicked makes people like the mimicker more, with no statistical sign of publication bias. The vault records that meta-analysis from a search summary and has not settled its author list or year, so neither is printed here.

In the account of emotional contagion set out by Elaine Hatfield and colleagues, mimicry is the first of three steps. A person copies the expression, voice and posture of the other, the copying feeds back into their own feeling, and the feeling has then spread. Mimicry is the best supported of the three. The feedback step, which relies on facial feedback, is the weaker one.

In effect

In research

A 2006 study in the Academy of Management Journal by Patricia Barger and Alicia Grandey is a clear case of mimicry in a real setting. Independent coders rated the strength of employees' and customers' smiles at three points during service encounters, and 173 customers completed surveys afterwards. Mimicry effects were supported: customers' smiles followed the employee's. The same study then separated the copying of a smile from the customer's satisfaction. Only customers' appraisals of service quality, and not their own mood, fully accounted for the link between the employee's smiling and the customer's satisfaction. Copying a smile, on that evidence, did not by itself produce the verdict.

In everyday life

The everyday form is the one most people can recognise. Two people at a table drift into similar postures, or a listener nods and smiles as the speaker does. The best-supported single claim in the area is the plainest: being mimicked makes people like the mimicker somewhat more. Nothing in that finding requires the copying to be noticed, and nothing in it makes the liking large or lasting.

In commerce

Mimicry reaches commerce mostly through trade-book retellings. Waiters who repeat a customer's order back in the customer's own words are reported to earn larger tips, and negotiators who subtly imitate a counterpart are reported to reach agreements more often. The vault holds these as records and has not checked them against the primary papers. The reported multipliers are the headline of each retelling, and the direction of the effect is better supported than the size.

What it does not say

It does not say that copying is always automatic. The strong automaticity claim belongs to one specific paper, and the wider literature does not depend on it.

It does not say that copying a feeling produces the feeling. In the service study above, customers copied the smile and their satisfaction followed their judgement of the service.

It does not say that the commercial multipliers in popular books are reliable. They are single studies, quoted without sample sizes and unchecked here.

It does not say that mimicry is deliberate manipulation. Most mimicry in ordinary conversation is not chosen by either party.

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