Understanding the Role of the ‘Self’ in the Social Priming of Mimicry

Abstract

People have a tendency to unconsciously mimic other's actions. This mimicry has been regarded as a prosocial response which increases social affiliation. Previous research on social priming of mimicry demonstrated an assimilative relationship between mimicry and prosociality of the primed construct: prosocial primes elicit stronger mimicry whereas antisocial primes decrease mimicry. The present research extends these findings by showing that assimilative and contrasting prime-to-behavior effect can both happen on mimicry. Specifically, experiment 1 showed a robust contrast priming effect where priming antisocial behaviors induces stronger mimicry than priming prosocial behaviors. In experiment 2, we manipulated the self-relatedness of the pro/antisocial primes and further revealed that prosocial primes increase mimicry only when the social primes are self-related whereas antisocial primes increase mimicry only when the social primes are self-unrelated. In experiment 3, we used a novel cartoon movie paradigm to prime pro/antisocial behaviors and manipulated the perspective-taking when participants were watching these movies. Again, we found that prosocial primes increase mimicry only when participants took a first-person point of view whereas antisocial primes increase mimicry only when participants took a third-person point of view, which replicated the findings in experiment 2. We suggest that these three studies can be best explained by the active-self theory, which claims that the direction of prime-to-behavior effects depends on how primes are processed in relation to the ‘self’.

Top-down social modulation of interpersonal observation–execution

“…It has also been suggested that anti-social primes may increase the desire to restore social harmony, which leads to increased mimicry as a means to affiliate with a partner (Wang & Hamilton, 2013). This type of priming is consistent with social top-down response processes (Wang & Hamilton, 2012) that modulate motor contagion based on the affiliation goal.…”

“…Such a finding is also opposite to the social top-down modulation effects reported in most other work on automatic imitation (Cook & Bird, 2011;Leighton et al, 2010) and mimicry . In said studies, increased mimicry effects following pro-social priming have been suggested to result from the activation of social motives designed to affiliate with another individual (Lakin & Chartrand, 2003;Wang & Hamilton, 2012) and/or the activation of a prosocial self-schema eliciting interpersonal behaviour designed to assimilate (Wang & Hamilton, 2013).…”

“…For instance, in the work of Wang and Hamilton (2013), the mimicry effects were specific to the anti-social prime from a third-person perspective (e.g., "Joe cruelly bullied Stephanie about her weight problem") as opposed to a first-person perspective (e.g., "I cruelly bullied…”

“…These modulatory effects were related to the lower-level stimulus-motion properties with executed orthogonal deviation following a similar trace to the observed curvilinear movement trajectory. We suggest the interpersonal nature of the task may have elicited a third-person prime perspective, which drew comparisons between the prime and self (Wang & Hamilton, 2013), and/or the affiliation goal that was further enhanced when presented with an anti-social prime, deemed a threat toward the interpersonal encounter (Wang & Hamilton, 2012). Thus, the direction of mimicry-/contagion-like effects is specific to the self-comparison process, and the desire to affiliate with the model stimulus.…”

The influence of prosocial priming on visual perspective taking and automatic imitation

“…The tendency towards imitation (incongruent RT less congruent 80 RT) will hereafter be referred to as the congruency effect. 81A handful of studies have explored the effects of prosocial priming on automatic 82 imitation [16,17, 18]. Priming is thought to operate by subtly triggering a goal that 83 unconsciously guides behaviour [19].…”