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Is It True, I Can Automatically Become Just Like You? Print E-mail
SciMed - Neuroscience
TS-Si News Service   
Saturday, 16 August 2008 17:30
Fitting in.
TS-Si Soc & Psych
Washington, DC, USA. Depending on how much the opinions of other people matters to you, being excluded from their group can decrease your mood, while reducing self-esteem and feelings of belonging. In extreme cases, exclusion is blamed for pathologically negative behavior (e.g., the Virginia Tech shootings).
 
As a result, we often try to fit in with others in both conscious and automatic ways. Psychologists have studied this tendency of people to copy automatically the behaviors of others. They tried to find out how this mimicry can be used as an affiliation strategy. The study results appear in Psychological Science.
 
I Am Too Just Like You: Nonconscious Mimicry as an Automatic Behavioral Response to Social Exclusion. Jessica L. Lakin, Tanya L. Chartrand, and Robert M. Arkin. Psychological Science; published ahead of print, August 2008. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.x.x  [ Download PDF ]
 
Psychologists Jessica L. Lakin of Drew University, Tanya L. Chartrand of Duke University, and Robert M. Arkin of The Ohio State University conducted a series of experiments.
  • 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 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 study suggests that although nonconscious mimicry is an automatic action, it is still influenced by a variety of factors, such as situation and the target of the affiliation.
 
“People whose need to belong is threatened do not necessarily mimic the first person they see; they take into account aspects of the situation and act accordingly, all unconsciously,” the authors conclude.
 
“Conceptualized this way, automatic mimicry is certainly is a useful addition to the human behavioral repertoire.”
 


I Am Too Just Like You: Nonconscious Mimicry as an Automatic Behavioral Response to Social Exclusion. Jessica L. Lakin, Tanya L. Chartrand, and Robert M. Arkin. Psychological Science; published ahead of print, August 2008. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.x.x  [ Download PDF ]

Abstract

Research across various disciplines has demonstrated that social exclusion has devastating psychological, emotional, and behavioral consequences. Excluded individuals are therefore motivated to affiliate with others, even though they may not have the resources, cognitive or otherwise, to do so. The current research explored whether nonconscious mimicry of other individuals—a low-cost, low-risk, automatic behavior—might help excluded individuals address threatened belongingness needs. Experiment 1 demonstrated that excluded people mimic a subsequent interaction partner more than included people do. Experiment 2 showed that individuals excluded by an in-group selectively (and nonconsciously) mimic a confederate who is an in-group member more than a confederate who is an out-group member. The relationship between exclusion and mimicry suggests that there are automatic behaviors people can use to recover from the experience of being excluded. In addition, this research demonstrates that nonconscious mimicry is selective and sensitive to context.

 

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Is It True, I Can Automatically Become Just Like You?
Saturday, 16 August 2008

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Last Updated on Saturday, 16 August 2008 10:27