What They Don't know Might Help Them: A Demonstration of Subtle Social Inference from Mimicry

Nuanced Social Inferences about Trustworthiness from Observation of Mimicry Liam C. Kavanagh (lkavanag@ucsd.edu) Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA Giti Bakhtiari (giti.bakhtiari@uni-wuerzburg.de) Department of Psychology, University of Wurzburg Rontgenring 10, Wurzburg, DE Christopher L. Suhler (clsuhler@ucsd.edu) Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA Patricia S. Churchland (pschurchland@ucsd.edu) Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA Rob Holland (r.holland@psych.ru.ni) Department of Social and Cultural Psychology, Radboud University Nijmegen 6500 HE Nijmegen, Netherlands Piotr Winkielman (pwinkielman@ucsd.edu) Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA Abstract (Bernieri 1998), and are more prosocial after being mimicked (Lakin, Jefferis, Cheng, & Chartrand, 2003). Interestingly, many of these effects occur without participants’ consciousness of mimicry (Chartrand & Bargh, To date, the mimicry literature has focused on the interacting dyad (for a review, see Chartrand & van Baaren, 2009). However, the social context of mimicry often includes many interacting parties. Here, human observers can use information about who mimics whom to make social judgments. This was shown in a recent series of experiments by Kavanagh, Suhler, Churchland, and Winkielman (2011). Participants (observers) viewed videos of one-on-one interviews, and evaluated the interviewee’s competence. In some videos the interviewee mimicked the interviewer’s gestures (leg crossing, chin-rubbing) and in the other videos the interviewee did not mimic. Additionally, the attitude of the interviewer towards the interviewee was manipulated: in some videos, the interviewers were cordial to the interviewee and in others they were condescending to the interviewee. The results showed that the impact of mimicry on the observers’ (participants’) judgments of interviewees’ competence depended on whom the interviewee mimicked. When the interviewer was rude to the interviewee, mimicking interviewees were rated as significantly less competent than non-mimicking interviewees. When the interviewer was cordial to the interviewee, mimicking Mimicry and imitation are crucial mechanisms of social learning and rapport. Further, mimicry informs essential social judgments formed not only by the interacting party but also by third-party observers. How sophisticated are observer’s inferences from mimicry? We examined this in the context of observers’ use of mimicry to judge trustworthiness. Participants observed a dyadic interaction in which a target mimicked or did not mimic a model. Prior to observation, the model’s honesty was earlier defamed, or praised, in front of some, but not other, targets. Observers always knew the model’s reputation. Observers also knew which targets were aware of the model’s reputation. Results suggest that observers’ use of mimicry in trust judgments is very sophisticated It reflects not just the presence of mimicry, but also the model’s moral reputation and, critically, knowledge of the target’s awareness of the model’s reputation. This sophistication leads observers to rate targets as trustworthy when they mimic untrustworthy models, but only when the observers know that the model reputation is unknown to the target. Keywords: Mimicry; Imitation; Inference, Social Judgment; Trust Introduction Mimicry is an essential part of the human social repertoire that is inexorably bound up to basic social processes of empathy, bonding, and in-group formation (Churchland, 2011; Kashima, 2008; Lakin & Chartrand, 2003; Lakin, Jefferis, Cheng, & Chartrand 2003; Preston & De Waal, 2002). We have greater rapport with those who mimic us