Hack98.Monkey See, Monkey Do

Hack 98. Monkey See, Monkey Do

We mimic accents, gestures, and mannerisms without even noticing, and it seems it's the mere act of perception that triggers it.

We're born imitators, even without knowing we're doing it. I have a British accent, but whenever I spend a couple of weeks in North America, I start to pick up the local pronunciation. It's the same with hanging around certain groups of friends and ending up using words common in that group without realizing I'm picking them up.

Imitation doesn't require immersion in a culture. You can start mirroring people's movements without realizing it in moments.

10.7.1. In Action

I find a lot of psychology experiments a little mean, because they often involve telling the participants the experiment is about one thing, when actually it's about something else entirely. Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh's experiments on what they dub the Chameleon Effect fall into this category of keeping the participants in the dark (but are harmless enough not to be mean).¹

Chartrand and Bargh had volunteers take part in a dummy task of describing photographs while sitting in pairs, taking turns looking at each photo and speaking outloud their free associations. What the volunteers didn't know was that describing the photographs wasn't the point of the experiment and that their partner wasn't a volunteer but a confederate in league with the experiment organizers. The confederate exhibited some subtle behavior, either rubbing his face or shaking his foot for the 10-minute duration of the experiment.

What the experimenters were actually watching was how often a subject would rub her own face or shake her own footultimately, how much a person could have her behavior influenced by the confederate, a person she hadn't met before and had no requirement to be friends with. The answer: behavior is influenced a lot.

Sitting with a face-rubbing confederate, a volunteer would rub her own face once every 100 seconds, on average. Normally, away from exposure to face-rubbing, she'd have about 30 seconds longer between touches.

The results are similar and more dramatic for foot shakinga doubling of shaking from just over once every 3 minutes to once every 80 seconds, just while sitting for about 10 minutes with someone who is shaking his foot every so often.

Given that this works, you've a chance to be rather mean. Next time you're in a café with friends, or at dinner, try scratching or touching your face and see what happens. Triggering a very particular response like a nose scratch may be rarer, but you can definitely get whoever you're with to do a bit of face touching.

You can be quite subtle too. In the experiments, the subjects were asked whether they'd noticed any standout behavior from the confederates: they hadn't. So it's not a matter of deliberate mimicry.

10.7.2. How It Works

Nonconscious imitation isn't limited to gestures. We adopt the same tone of voice and even the same sentence structure as conversational partners, and so in this way couples who have been married for a long time really do come to resemble each other.²

There's a great example of hownonconsciouslywe mimic facial expressions, found when O'Toole and Dubin³ watched mothers feeding their children. The mother would usually open her mouth, ostensibly as a signal for the kid to open his mouth too. But it turned out that, 80% of the time, the mother opened her mouth after the child did so. The child was opening his mouth just because food was on the way; the mother was mimicking without knowing it, just following her child's lead.

So why imitate? That's still an open question. It may simply be part of the mechanism we use to perceive other people. Anything we perceive has to have some kind of representation in the brainotherwise it wouldn't be a perceptionand so there are representations of straight edges, faces, colors, and so on. There are also single neurons that activate when a very specific action takes place: grasping and pushing with your hand activate two different neurons. What's remarkable is that these same neurons activate when you simply see somebody else doing the same movement, even if you're not doing it yourself.⁴

Mirror neurons, found in the frontal cortex, are therefore not just what the brain is doing to tell your hand to grasp or push, they're actually the internal representation of that movement, whether you're perceiving it in yourself or in somebody else. They're the very idea of "grasp," divorced from implementation detail.

Now, we know that if you hear a word, the representation of it in your brain causes associated words to be primed [Hack #81] . Hearing the word "water" will mean you're more likely to shout out "river" (which has therefore been primed) than "money" when somebody asks you to free-associate from the word "bank." You don't even need to have had conscious awareness of the word that has primed you [Hack #82] all that matters is the representation of the word being constructed in your brain somehow, not that it makes it through the filter of attention.

The same may be true for perceiving gestures and movements of other people. Even though you're not concentrating on their movements, other people do have some kind of representation in your brain, and the way you understand them is in terms of your own mirror neurons. In turn, the mirror neuron for "scratch" is activated and primes that activity next time your hand is idle. Seeing someone scratch, in this model, would make it more probable for you to scratch yourself.

I find that even reading about it has the same effect. Are you a little itchy right now?

M.W.

10.7.3. In Real Life

Whatever the mechanism, the result of two people mirroring each other is clear: mirroring is part of building rapport. If you're a fan of people watching, you can often tell how well two people are getting along by watching very small movements and how shared they aredo the pair you're watching lean back at the same time or synchronize laughing? Try looking round a table and see whether good friends mirror each other more than randomly chosen pairs. It can stand out a lot, when you're looking for it.

One big question is why mirroring is such a strong part of rapport. I think the question of why we mirror is a simple answer of learning from the society we're born in. We don't have all the knowledge we need for the world hardwired in our brains from birth; we have to acquire it from those around us, and mirroring is just the tiniest manifestation of that picking up of behavior.

T.S.

10.7.4. End Notes

1. Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception-behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(6), 893-910. This, and other papers by Tanya Chartrand, can be found on the publications page of her web site: http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~tlc10/bio/pdf_articles/article_index.htm.

2. Dijksterhuis, A., & Bargh, J. A. (2001). The perception-behavior expressway: Automatic effects of social perception on social behavior. In M. P. Zanna (ed.). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 33, 1-40. New York: Academic Press. (Highly recommended as a broad and comprehensive review.)

3. O'Toole, R., & Dubin, R. (1968). Baby feeding and body swap: An experiment in George Herberts Mead's "Taking the role of the other." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10, 59-65. Cited in Dijksterhuis & Bargh (2001).²

4. V. S. Ramachandran, "Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force Behind `the Great Leap Forward' in Human Evolution" (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html).