Motor mimicry

Motor Mimicry

Motor mimicry is a common neurological phenomenon where a person reacts to an event happening to someone else. Examples of motor mimicry include wincing at someone else's injury or ducking when someone else does. Motor mimicry can also have more social and emotional manifestations, like unconsciously matching a peer's posture or speech patterns.

The working definition of motor mimicry is:

1. similar to one made by the other person

2. one that the other person might make in their situation

3. not what the observer would do as an observer

4. not irrelevant or involuntary behaviors

Historically:

Traditional views on motor mimicry have seen it stemming from empathy, or feeling what someone else is. This theory on motor mimicry matches some resulting behaviors of mimicry, such as when someone is injured or emotionally in distress.

While motor mimicry was seen as a form of sympathy, H. Spencer (1870) called motor mimicry a "presentative" sympathy, the most primitive of the types of sympathy Spence came up with, for being more immediate and reactive. Rather than "representative" sympathy, which would be more conscious and emotional.

More recently, it has been revealed that motor mimicry is more communicative and acts as a nonverbal message between people (Bavelas et al. 1986).

In general, motor mimicry has been observed for more than two centuries, and while it has been dismissed as being "primitive" but has still evaded many theories made about the phenomenon.

Motor Mimicry in Infants and Children:

In the early 1900s, psychologists started focusing on motor mimicry in infants and young children. In Allport's study on infants, he observed that "the child tends to assume the movements, strains and attitudes of the model." and that "he cannot help doing so".

Later on, Allport concluded that mimicry was a genetic and conceptual way to social learning. However, Allport disagreed with those that thought conditioning was a possible explanation for motor mimicry in children. Rather, he concluded that "this process of empathy remains a riddle in social psychology".

Supporting Allport's argument, Darwin also observed the precsence of nonverbal sympathy in his 4-month old son. Darwin noted that his son would smile when he did and by the time he was 6 months old, Darwin's son would assume a "melancholy expression" when his nurse pretended to cry. From this, Darwin anticipated that motor mimicry was a form of nonverbal social communication.

Experimentation

Hull (1933)

In 1933, Clark Hull was the first person to experiment with motor mimicry and record the results. Hull arranged for an observer to witness another person straining and reaching, and by pinning a clothespin to the observer's clothes and attaching it to a rotary event recorder, Hull was able to trace the movements of the observer. Hull found the even while just watching someone reach for something, the observer made traces of the movements that the subject they were watching did.

O'Toole and Dubin (1968)

Later, O'Toole and Dubin (1968) took Hull's experiment more in depth. In two parallel experiments, O'Toole and Dubin studied observers saying forward while a subject reached for something in front of them, as well as mothers opening their mouths while spoon feeding a baby.

In the first experiment, they found that while having an actor reach forward, observers consistently swayed forwards as well, instead of other directions. However, a large issue in this experiment was that O'Toole and Dubin did not take into account static ataxia, which produces forward movement even with the individual is attemping to stand perfectly still. Additionally, neither of O'Toole and Dubin's experiments were filmed, leaving us with only an observer's recollection and interpretation of the results.

In the second experiment, they found evidence that the mother only opened her mouth after her baby had, ruling out that the mother was really mimicking the baby and not trying to induce the baby to open their mouths.

MacInnis (1979)

It wasn't until 1979 that MacInnis introduced videotaped stimuli. MacInnis found that around 40% of the subjects displayed mimicking movements towards the stimuli they were exposed to. He also recorded the subjects feelings of empathy towards the stimuli. The mimicked movements and feelings of empathy had no relation according to MacInnis.

Social Settings

A large characteristic in interactions between people in social settings is unconscious motor mimicry. Taking on the same posture, head movements, gestures and even speech patterns as the person interacting with us is a universal human characteristic. However, we don't mimic everyone around us all the time. Chartrand & Bargh (1999) showed that people who have higher perspective taking (paying more attention to the people and situation around them with respect to how others points of view) tend to mimic the people around them more than those lower in perspective taking.

Theories

The communicative theory:

The principle of the communicative theory of motor mimicry is that motor mimicry is an interpersonal process and is not a reflection of any internal processes. Instead, the communicative theory reflects that motor mimicry is expressive to the other person in the situation. This theory then indirectly proposes that any mimicry in a social setting is communicative and that showing how you feel through these motions is analogous to verbally communicating those feelings.