Psychology in Your Life
IN WHAT WAYS ARE YOU LIKE A CHAMELEON?
Here’s something you may have noticed: When you interact
with other people, you are quite likely to find yourself
mimicking them in certain ways. You may, for example,
unconsciously match your friends’ speech patterns and
accents. Social psychologists Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh
(1999) labeled this type of mimicry the chameleon effect.
Chameleons automatically change their color to blend in
with their environment. Chartrand and Bargh suggested that
humans also automatically adjust their behavior to blend with
the people around them.
In their original demonstration of the chameleon effect,
Chartrand and Bargh had pairs of people interact to describe
photographs. However, one member of each pair was
actually a confederate of the researchers. Chartrand and
Bargh instructed the confederates to perform one of two
motor gestures while describing the photographs: Either
they rubbed their faces or they shook one foot. If people act
like chameleons, we would expect that the experimental
participants would mimic those motor gestures. That’s exactly
what happened. Participants were considerably more likely
to rub their faces or shake their feet when the confederates
performed those actions.
Chartrand and Bargh speculated that this form of mimicry
functions as a type of “social glue.” By producing identical
motor gestures, people make themselves more similar to the
other individuals around them. Recall from the discussion of
social relationships that similarity increases liking. For that
reason, Chartrand and Bargh hypothesized that people whose
CRITICAL THINKING Recall the study that examined
participants’ judgments of attractive and unattractive indi-
viduals. Why was it important that the participants did not
know the individuals in the photographs?
Study and Review on MyPsychLab
AGGRESSION, ALTRUISM,
AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR
If you spend a few minutes reviewing the daily news, you’ll
almost certainly get reports on the extremes of human
behavior: You’ll learn both about situations in which people
have done each other harm and those in which people have
done each other good. This section considers the factors that
gestures were mimicked by a partner would like that partner
better. To test that hypothesis, Chartrand and Bargh conducted
a second study in which they instructed their confederates
to subtly mimic the actions of the experimental participants.
Compared to members of the control group, whose gestures
were not mimicked, the mimicked participants consistently
reported liking the confederates better. Importantly, only one of
the 37 participants was aware of having been mimicked. This
strongly suggests that the chameleon effect operates outside
of conscious awareness.
Even so, these results might lead you to wonder
whether you could do better in some social circumstances
by consciously mimicking others’ behavior. To address this
question, researchers provided explicit instructions to a
subset of students who were about to carry out a negotiation:
“Successful negotiators recommend that you should mimic the
mannerisms of your negotiation partner to get a better deal.
For example, when the other person rubs his/her face, you
should too. If he/she leans back or leans forward in the chair,
you should too. However, they say it is very important that you
mimic subtly enough that the other person does not notice what
you are doing, otherwise this technique completely backfires”
(Maddux et al., 2008, p. 463). The students who received these
instructions consistently scored more points in the negotiation
than their peers who were not encouraged to mimic.
Now that you know about the chameleon effect, do you
think you will be more aware of how mimicry affects your
social relationships?
yield both types of behavior. We begin with acts of aggression:
People’s behaviors that cause psychological or physical harm to
other individuals. Psychologists try to understand the causes of
aggression with the goal of using that knowledge to help reduce
societal levels of aggression. We then turn our attention to the
positive extreme: The prosocial behaviors that people carry
out with the goal of helping other people. A particulal focus
will be on altruism—the prosocial behaviors people carry out
without considering their own safety or interests. The section
discusses some personal and situational factors that change the
likelihood of these helping behaviors.
aggression Behaviors that cause psychological or physical harm to
another individual.
prosocial behavior Behavior that is carried out with the goal of helping
other people.
altruism Prosocial behaviors a person carries out without considering
his or her own safety or interests.
Aggression, Altruism, and Prosocial Behavior 473