Mimicry
Also known as: Chameleon effect, Behavioral mimicry
We unconsciously copy the postures, gestures, and speech of people around us.
What it means
Mimicry is the largely automatic and nonconscious tendency to imitate the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and speech patterns of interaction partners. Dubbed the chameleon effect, it functions as a social glue: people who are mimicked report liking the mimicker more and rate the interaction as smoother, and we naturally mimic those we want to affiliate with more than those we do not. The proposed mechanism is a tight perception-behavior link, in which merely perceiving an action activates the corresponding motor representation, nudging us to perform it. Mimicry is bidirectional with rapport — it both flows from liking and creates it — and is implicated in emotional contagion, since copying expressions can induce the matching feeling. It matters because subtle synchrony shapes persuasion, negotiation, helping, and trust, and because it can be deliberately exploited by salespeople and negotiators.
Examples
In a lab study, participants sitting with a confederate who rubbed her face or shook her foot unconsciously began doing the same, and liked her more when she had subtly mirrored them.
A waiter who repeats your order back in your own words, rather than paraphrasing it, tends to be tipped better — the echo reads as attentiveness rather than technique.
You come home from a week with relatives and catch yourself using their turns of phrase and vowel sounds, having adopted a way of speaking you never decided to adopt.
First described in Chartrand & Bargh (1999).