43-1 What is automatic mimicry, and how do conformity experiments reveal the power of social influence?

Fish swim in schools. Birds fly in flocks. And humans, too, tend to go with their group, to think what it thinks and do what it does. Behavior is contagious. Chimpanzees are more likely to yawn after observing another chimpanzee yawn (Anderson et al., 2004). Ditto for humans. If one of us yawns, laughs, coughs, stares at the sky, or checks a cell phone, others in our group will often do the same. Yawn mimicry can also occur across species: Dogs more often yawn after observing their owners’ yawn (Silva et al., 2012). Even just reading about yawning increases people’s yawning (Provine, 2012), as perhaps you have noticed?

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Like the chameleon lizards that take on the color of their surroundings, we humans take on the emotional tones of those around us. Just hearing someone reading a neutral text in either a happy- or sad-sounding voice creates “mood contagion” in listeners (Neumann & Strack, 2000). We are natural mimics, unconsciously imitating others’ expressions, postures, and voice tones.

Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh captured this mimicry, which they call the chameleon effect (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). They had students work in a room alongside another person, who was actually a confederate working for the experimenters. Sometimes the confederates rubbed their own face. Sometimes they shook their foot. Sure enough, the students tended to rub their face when with the face-rubbing person and shake their foot when with the foot-shaking person. Other studies have found people synchronizing their grammar to match material they are reading or people they are hearing (Ireland & Pennebaker, 2010).

We should not be surprised, then, that intricate studies show that obesity, sleep loss, drug use, loneliness, and happiness spread through social networks (Christakis & Fowler, 2009). We and our friends form a social system. On websites, positive ratings generate more positive ratings—a phenomenon called “positive herding” (Muchnik et al., 2013). In a massive experiment on the 2010 U.S. congressional election day, Facebook showed 61 million people a message that encouraged their voting, with a link to a local voting place and a clickable “I voted” button. Those who also received these messages with pictures of Facebook friends who had already voted became slightly more likely to vote—enough so to have generated an estimated 282,000 additional voters (FIGURE 43.1).

Automatic mimicry helps us to empathize—to feel what others are feeling. This helps explain why we feel happier around happy people than around depressed people. It also helps explain why studies of groups of British workers have revealed mood linkage, or the sharing of moods (Totterdell et al., 1998). Empathic people yawn more after seeing others yawn (Morrison, 2007). And empathic mimicking fosters fondness (van Baaren et al., 2003, 2004). Perhaps you’ve noticed that when someone nods their head as you do and echoes your words, you feel a certain rapport and liking?

Suggestibility and mimicry sometimes lead to tragedy. In the eight days following the 1999 shooting rampage at Colorado’s Columbine High School, every U.S. state except Vermont experienced threats of copycat violence. Pennsylvania alone recorded 60 such threats (Cooper, 1999). Sociologist David Phillips and his colleagues (1985, 1989) found that suicides, too, sometimes increase following a highly publicized suicide. In the wake of screen idol Marilyn Monroe’s suicide on August 5, 1962, for example, the number of suicides in the United States exceeded the usual August count by 200.

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What causes behavior clusters? Do people act similarly because of their influence on one another? Or because they are simultaneously exposed to the same events and conditions? Seeking answers to such questions, social psychologists have conducted experiments on group pressure and conformity.

Suggestibility and mimicry are subtle types of conformity—adjusting our behavior or thinking toward some group standard. To study conformity, Solomon Asch (1955) devised a simple test. Imagine yourself as a participant in what you believe is a study of visual perception. You arrive in time to take a seat at a table with five other people. The experimenter asks the group to state, one by one, which of three comparison lines is identical to a standard line. You see clearly that the answer is Line 2, and you await your turn to say so. Your boredom begins to show when the next set of lines proves equally easy.

Now comes the third trial, and the correct answer seems just as clear-cut (FIGURE 43.2). But the first person gives what strikes you as a wrong answer: “Line 3.” When the second person and then the third and fourth give the same wrong answer, you sit up straight and squint. When the fifth person agrees with the first four, you feel your heart begin to pound. The experimenter then looks to you for your answer. Torn between the unanimity voiced by the five others and the evidence of your own eyes, you feel tense and suddenly unsure. You hesitate before answering, wondering whether you should suffer the discomfort of being the oddball. What answer do you give?

In Asch’s experiments, college students, answering questions alone, erred less than 1 percent of the time. But what about when several others—“confederates” working for the experimenter—answered incorrectly? Although most people told the truth even when others did not, Asch was disturbed by his result: More than one-third of the time, these “intelligent and well-meaning” college students were “willing to call white black” by going along with the group.

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Later investigations have not always found as much conformity as Asch found, but they have revealed that we are more likely to conform when we

Why do we so often think what others think and do what they do? Why, in college residence halls, do students’ attitudes become more similar to those living near them (Cullum & Harton, 2007)? Why, when asked controversial questions, are students’ answers more diverse when using anonymous electronic clickers than when raising hands (Stowell et al., 2010)? Why do we clap when others clap, eat as others eat, believe what others believe, say what others say, even see what others see?

Frequently, we conform to avoid rejection or to gain social approval. In such cases, we are responding to normative social influence. We are sensitive to social norms—understood rules for accepted and expected behavior—because the price we pay for being different can be severe. We need to belong.

At other times, we conform because we want to be accurate. Groups provide information, and only an uncommonly stubborn person will never listen to others. “Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth,” observed Joseph Joubert, an eighteenth-century French essayist. When we accept others’ opinions about reality, we are responding to informational social influence. As Rebecca Denton demonstrated in 2004, sometimes it pays to assume others are right and to follow their lead. Denton set a record for the farthest distance driven on the wrong side of a British divided highway—30 miles, with only one minor sideswipe, before the motorway ran out and police were able to puncture her tires. Denton, who was intoxicated, later explained that she thought the hundreds of other drivers coming at her were all on the wrong side of the road (Woolcock, 2004).

Is conformity good or bad? The answer depends partly on our culturally influenced values. Western Europeans and people in most English-speaking countries tend to prize individualism. People in many Asian, African, and Latin American countries place a higher value on honoring group standards. In social influence experiments across 17 countries, conformity rates have been lower in individualist cultures (Bond & Smith, 1996). American university students, for example, tend to see themselves, in domains ranging from consumer purchases to political views, as less conforming than others (Pronin et al., 2007). We are, in our own eyes, individuals amid a crowd of sheep.

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