Mimicry and automatic imitation are not correlated

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

  • Oliver Genschow
  • Sofie Van Den Bossche
  • Emiel Cracco
  • Lara Bardi
  • Davide Rigoni
  • Marcel Brass

It is widely known that individuals have a tendency to imitate each other. However, different psychological disciplines assess imitation in different manners. While social psychologists assess mimicry by means of action observation, cognitive psychologists assess automatic imitation with reaction time based measures on a trial-by-trial basis. Although these methods differ in crucial methodological aspects, both phenomena are assumed to rely on similar underlying mechanisms. This raises the fundamental question whether mimicry and automatic imitation are actually correlated. In the present research we assessed both phenomena and did not find a meaningful correlation. Moreover, personality traits such as empathy, autism traits, and traits related to self- versus other-focus did not correlate with mimicry or automatic imitation either. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere0183784
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume12
Issue number9
Number of pages21
ISSN1932-6203
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 06.09.2017
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Genschow et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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