The Chameleon Effect

In my Executive Presence and Body Language  seminars, perhaps the most frequently asked question
is...

Does mimicking other people's body language 'really' help them to like us more?

Certainly self-help books and sales training manuals have advised us for decades that mirroring the body language of others can have a positive impact on rapport. Chartrand & Bargh (1999) set out to address, in a series of experiments, a slightly larger question.

Does mimicry actually increase liking OR do we automatically mimic others in our interactions with them?  

Two key sets of experiments were conducted.  In the first, people met with an experimental 'confederate' who was instructed to vary their mannerisms throughout the meeting.  Some smiled more, some waggled their foot more, others engaged in more face touching.  The findings? Participants naturally and unconsciously tended to copy the confederate, following and mirroring their gestural cues.  Face touching went up 20%, while foot waggling increased as much as 50%. This definitely indicates that we unconsciously will mimic the behavioural cues of others during our interactions with them.  Although not tested in this series of experiments, others have found that this unconscious behaviour occurs more when you want the other party to think favourable of you than when you do not.  (think interviews versus adversarial meetings)

This then begs the question...  can you get people to like you more by mimicking them?  In a follow up experiment, Chartrand & Bargh wanted to determine whether there is a true benefit to behavioural mimicry, or whether it is simply a natural by-product of our social interactions.  In this experimental series, instead of leading the behaviours and seeing whether the participants picked them up and mimicked them, confederates were directed to mimic the body language of the participants.

Afterward, participants were requested to provide ratings of the 'likeability' of the confederates they spoke with.  Participants rated those that mimicked them, through body language, higher than those that didn't demonstrate any mimicking  behaviour. The bottom line?

• mimicry can serve to increase liking, empathy and rapport
• we will unconsciously mimic the behaviour of others when we want them to like us

In order to build rapport with someone faster, consider mirroring any of the following...

• Vocal volume, pace, pitch, pauses
• Verbal phrases, tenses (active versus passive), references
• Visual cues (posture, eye contact, leg crossing, gestures)

To test whether the two of you are 'in rapport'...  shift from mirroring (following the behavioural cue) to leading it.  If you find that shortly after you have demonstrated a gestural cue the other party also engages in the same behaviour, you are in rapport.  

In general, think of the 'Chameleon effect' as a component of our social interactions with others; behaviours that typically serve to heighten the pro-social behaviour of the other party.  But... bear in mind... there is a vast difference between mimicking/mirroring the behaviour of someone with the desire to connect with them and mimicking/imitating the other party to poke fun at them.  The first may serve to heighten your connection whereas the latter is sure to alienate the other party.  The intent that drives the behaviour often also drives the response.  

Doorways and Forgetfulness

We have all had the experience of walking into a new room in our home, on a mission to get something, and... we completely forget what we were looking for!  We look around, typically in vain,searching for something to jog our memories, something that will serve to remind us what we were looking for.  Before blaming the lapse on your misspent youth and the number of brain cells you inadvertently killed off in the pursuit of a party, research offers a unique perspective.

It was the doorway.  Walking through doorways empties your mind and causes forgetting.  Really!

According to research conducted by Gabriel Radvansky and his associates, doorways create a disruption in our situational models, our internal pictures of our environments.  In their experiments (both real and virtual) they asked participants to pick up objects and move them from one table to another, picking up a new object and moving it to another table.  The distance travelled from table to table was consistent and the participants could not see tables and objects left behind from one table to another.  Periodically they would be asked about the object they were carrying and the object they had just put down.  

Whether in virtual environments or the physical reality, when people walked through a doorway they had more difficulty not only remembering the object they had just put down, but the object they were carrying as well.  Radvansky also studied whether returning to the original room served as a memory jogger, re-instating memory.  As it turns out... not really.

It seems that we construct situational models of our environment.  They are not particularly specific because we are living in that environment currently.  We don't need to hold a strong mental map of it because we can check in with our environment at any time to pick up more details.  These situational models include not only information about the environment we are in, but also some vague information about ourselves within that environment (including insights into what we are carrying and doing).  Doorways though are entrances into new environments which require us to construct a new situational model.  This new model erases and over-writes the pre-existing model... causing us to 'forget'.

Changing the environment causes us to lose hold of the vague information that we have loosely been holding in our heads.  Walking through the doorway causes us to replace this vague concept with another vague concept.  Not early-onset Alzheimer's at all... just the doorway.  So... the next time you are walking behind me and I pause just before walking through a doorway...  know that I am not doing it to drive you crazy, just taking a mental note, reminding myself why I was going through that doorway in the first place!