Mimicry, social belonging, and automatic behavior


Filed Under Relating to People | Aug 8, MDT 12:05 pm

Humans have a tendency of mimicking each other in subtle ways; put two people in a room together, and if one of them starts rubbing their nose, the other might end up doing the same thing without realizing it.

No one has provided a comprehensive answer as to why people behave this way, though there have been some interesting studies which have given us at least a partial understanding of why we mimic each other.

Recent experiments, for example, have shown that our sense of belonging has an impact on our mirroring habits:

In one experiment, participants played an online ball-tossing game with three other computer players, and were either excluded or included in the game. After reporting their enjoyment of the game and what they thought of the other players, participants were asked to describe a photograph to a female confederate who constantly moved her foot, but not enough so that it was consciously noticed by the participant. The researchers hypothesized that participants in the excluded condition would move their foot more to match the confederate.

In the next experiment, the procedure was kept mostly the same. This time, however, all of the participants were female. They were excluded from either a group of males or females during the ball-tossing game and interacted with either a male or female confederate during the photo description task. Participants were also questioned more thoroughly on how they felt after the game, such as how much they felt they belonged to the group. The researchers predicted that if the female participants were ostracized by females and later interacted with a female confederate, then they would mimic the confederate more than other participants.

The results, appearing in the August issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, provided strong support for the researchers’ hypotheses. In the first experiment, participants who had been excluded from the game mimicked the confederate during the second task more than other participants. In the second experiment, participants excluded by members of their own sex mimicked a confederate of the same sex more than participants in other conditions. There was also an inverse relationship between feelings of belonging and nonconscious mimicry.

The evidence suggests then, that mirroring behavior is partly determined by how connected we feel to the people we’re interacting with. However, there are other issues at work. In another set of experiments, the researchers found that our tendency to mimic each other is also determined by how much we monitor ourselves.

Two studies examined nonconscious mimicry among high and low self-monitors in situations varying in affiliative cues. Participants interacted with a confederate who shook her foot (Study 1) or touched her face (Study 2). In both studies, high self-monitors were more likely to mimic the confederate’s subtle gestures when they believed the confederate to be a peer (Study 1) or someone superior to them (Study 2). Low self-monitors mimicked to the same degree across conditions. Thus, when the situation contains affiliative cues, high self-monitors use mimicry as a nonconscious strategy to get along with their interaction partner

And I’m just scratching the surface here; there’s much to be said about mimicry, but enough has been mentioned for me to establish the basis for my following argument.

We are not fully aware of the ways in which we behave; many of our behaviors are subtle responses to environmental conditions that we aren’t conscious of. This website is dedicated to helping people manage their feelings and mental states, and in order to manage those states it’s important that people realize what they’re feeling and doing. That level of realization involves a high degree of self-knowledge, and an uncommon degree of observational acuity.

When you catch yourself mirroring, you have to ask yourself why you’re doing it.

A certain branch of psychology, one with a very poor reputation, teaches people how to mirror behavior as a means of influencing others. I won’t go into the details here, but the process involves imitating people until they start imitating you back.  You move your leg when they move theirs, and eventually depending on other factors, they’ll start following your lead, scratching their nose when you scratch yours, for example.  However,  it’s not about influencing physical behavior but about guiding emotional responses and crafting a deliberate narrative for others to follow.

A lack of personal awareness makes you vulnerable to the machinations of other people. If you’re dealing with someone who pays closer attention to your behaviors than you do, that person will be able to manipulate you without your knowledge.

We don’t want that; or more specifically, I don’t want that. One of the reasons I consider this world to be as miserable as it is, is that people are unwittingly delegating responsibility for their feelings and emotions over to more forceful personalities. These forceful personalities are then  empowered by the support they receive to exert influence over people who are self-aware but lack the desire or the need to dominate others.

Social control, domination, and hierarchy are all born from unconscious and instinctive behavior. They all depend on personal ignorance; patriarchy , for example, is not the result of conscious and deliberate action, but of an instinctive reaction to specific environmental factors. A lack of self-awareness is the reason why we live in such a hostile social environment.

Mimicry is an example of how little control we have over ourselves. On it’s own, mimicry might seem like a harmless habit, but it’s part of a more dangerous network of irresponsible human behaviors.

Self-study and self-knowledge are not only the key to happiness and contentment, but to a more responsible and mature society, one in which people are aware of the actions they take and reasons which guide them.

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