People have the automatic tendency to mimic their interaction partners. Mimicry theories propose that such mimicking behavior is beneficial for the mimicker as mimicked persons tend to like, trust and help the mimicker more. Yet an open question remains as to whether prosocial effects translate to parties other than the mimicker. To test for the presence of such a spillover effect, we ran two field experiments (total = 460). In all experiments, participants interacted with an experimenter. The experimenter either verbally mimicked the participants or behaved naturally. Afterwards, either the experimenter or another person asked participants to donate to a charity. Across all experiments, our results indicate that irrespective of whether a donation request is made by the mimicker or another person, mimicry increases the likelihood to donate to a charity, but not the amount that participants are willing to donate. Bayesian analyses suggest that this effect is less strongly pronounced than assumed by previous research and theories.

中文翻译：

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模仿的溢出效应：被一个人模仿会增加对另一个人的亲社会行为


人们自然而然地倾向于模仿他们的互动伙伴。模仿理论认为，这种模仿行为对模仿者有利，因为被模仿者往往更喜欢、信任和帮助模仿者。然而，亲社会效应是否会转化为模仿者以外的其他各方，仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。为了测试这种溢出效应的存在，我们进行了两次现场实验（总计 = 460）。在所有实验中，参与者与实验者进行互动。实验者要么在口头上模仿参与者，要么表现得很自然。随后，实验者或其他人要求参与者向慈善机构捐款。在所有实验中，我们的结果表明，无论捐赠请求是由模仿者还是其他人提出，模仿会增加向慈善机构捐赠的可能性，但不会增加参与者愿意捐赠的金额。贝叶斯分析表明，这种效应不如之前的研究和理论假设的那么明显。