It\u2019s common for people to pick up on each other\u2019s movements. \u201cThis is the notion that when you\u2019re having a conversation with somebody and you don\u2019t care where your hands are, and the other person scratches your head, you scratch your head,\u201d says Sasha Ondobaka of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He cowrote the paper with Floris P. de Lange, Michael Wiemers, and Harold Bekkering of Radboud and Roger D. Newman-Norlund of the University of South Carolina. This kind of mimicry is well-established, but Ondobaka and his colleagues suspected that whether people mimic depends on their goals.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you and I both want to drink coffee, it would be good for me to synchronize my movement with yours,\u201d Ondobaka says. \u201cBut if you\u2019re going for a walk and I need coffee, it wouldn\u2019t make sense to be coupled on this movement level.\u201d<\/p>\n Ondobaka and his colleagues devised an experiment to see how much of a pull people feel to mimic when they have the same or different goals from someone else. Each participant sat across from an experimenter. They played a sort of card game on a touch screen embedded in the table between. First, two cards appeared in front of the experimenter, who chose either the higher or the lower card. Then two cards appeared in front of the participant. This happened 16 times in a row. For some 16-game series, the participant was told to do the same as the experimenter\u2014to choose the higher (or lower) card. For others, they were told to do the opposite. Participants were told to move as quickly and as accurately as possible.<\/p>\n When the participant was supposed to make the same choice as the experimenter, they moved faster when they were also reaching in the same direction as the experimenter. But when they were told to do the opposite of the experimenter\u2014when they had different goals\u2014they didn\u2019t go any faster when making the same movement as the other person. <\/strong>This means having different goals got in the way of the urge to mimic<\/strong>, Ondobaka says.<\/p>\n The researchers think that people only copy each other\u2019s movements when they\u2019re trying to accomplish the same thing<\/strong>. The rest of the time, actions are more related to your internal goals<\/strong>. \u201cWe\u2019re not walking around like chameleons copying everything,\u201d Ondobaka says. If you\u2019re on a busy street with dozens of people in view, you\u2019re not copying everything everybody does\u2014just the ones that have the same goal as you. \u201cIf a colleague or a friend is going with you, you will cross the street together.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: It\u2019s easy to pick up on the movements that other people make\u2014scratching your head, crossing your legs. But a new study published… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[230,229,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":680,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions\/680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/CoffeeBreak.jpg\" "\\"coffee")
It\u2019s easy to pick up on the movements that other people make\u2014scratching your head, crossing your legs. But a new study published in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people only feel the urge to mimic each other when they have the same goal<\/strong>.<\/p>\n