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Understanding the Role of the ‘Self’ in the Social Priming of Mimicry Yin Wang*, Antonia F de C Hamilton
School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
Abstract
People have a tendency to unconsciously mimic other’s actions. This mimicry has been regarded as a prosocial response which increases social affiliation. Previous research on social priming of mimicry demonstrated an assimilative relationship between mimicry and prosociality of the primed construct: prosocial primes elicit stronger mimicry whereas antisocial primes decrease mimicry. The present research extends these findings by showing that assimilative and contrasting prime- to-behavior effect can both happen on mimicry. Specifically, experiment 1 showed a robust contrast priming effect where priming antisocial behaviors induces stronger mimicry than priming prosocial behaviors. In experiment 2, we manipulated the self-relatedness of the pro/antisocial primes and further revealed that prosocial primes increase mimicry only when the social primes are self-related whereas antisocial primes increase mimicry only when the social primes are self-unrelated. In experiment 3, we used a novel cartoon movie paradigm to prime pro/antisocial behaviors and manipulated the perspective- taking when participants were watching these movies. Again, we found that prosocial primes increase mimicry only when participants took a first-person point of view whereas antisocial primes increase mimicry only when participants took a third-person point of view, which replicated the findings in experiment 2. We suggest that these three studies can be best explained by the active-self theory, which claims that the direction of prime-to-behavior effects depends on how primes are processed in relation to the ‘self’.
Citation: Wang Y, Hamilton AFd C (2013) Understanding the Role of the ‘Self’ in the Social Priming of Mimicry. PLoS ONE 8(4): e60249. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0060249
Editor: Manos Tsakiris, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom
Received December 20, 2012; Accepted February 24, 2013; Published April 2, 2013
Copyright: � 2013 Wang, Hamilton. 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.
Funding: This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/) Small Research Grant ES/J006793/1 (to AH). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: [email protected]
Introduction
People have a tendency to unconsciously imitate other’s actions,
termed ‘‘mimicry’’ [1]. This mimicry plays a critical role in
creating social bonds between people and has been regarded as a
behavioral strategy for social affiliation [2–4]. Although mimicry is
not normally conscious controlled, previous studies show that
mimicry is a subtle and flexible behavior which is sensitive to
multiple social factors such as prosociality, affiliation goals and self-
other distinction [5–8]. The present paper explores the interaction
of these social factors using priming paradigms.
Several studies so far have examined how prosocial or antisocial
primes influence mimicry. Increased mimicry following exposure
to prosocial or affiliative stimuli has commonly been found,
compared to antisocial and non-social stimuli [9–13]. For
example, by using a test of visual acuity, Lakin and Chartrand
[9] exposed participants to subliminal words related to the
conception of affiliation (e.g. affiliate/together) and found more
mimicry in a subsequent interaction. van Baaren et al., [10] had
participants complete a ‘scrambled sentence’ task in which
sentences contained affiliative (e.g. group/cooperate) or disaffilia-
tive (e.g. unique/alone) words. They found that more mimicry
behavior was induced in affiliative priming conditions than in
disaffiliative conditions. Using a novel stimulus-response compat-
ibility approach to measure mimicry, Leighton et al., [11] and
Cook & Bird [12,13] both found that priming sentences contained
prosocial words (e.g. sociable/agreeable) increases mimicry while
priming sentences contained antisocial words (e.g. rebel/selfish)
decreases mimicry.
The dominant explanation of the prosociality priming effects
above suggests that prosocial primes directly activate a goal to
affiliate [6,9,14,15]. This explanation is based on the goal-
activation theory of prime-to-behavior effects [16] which claims
that a given prime directly activates a goal, which then
automatically leads to pursuit of that goal. For example, when
participants are exposed to words related to the concept of
affiliation, they activate an affiliation goal and then show more
affiliative behavior including more mimicry.
This goal-activation explanation has also been applied to a
series of studies where mimicry is increased following a threat to a
participant’s affiliative needs. For example, people who were
primed with unsuccessful affiliation [9], ostracism [17,18] and
social isolation (e.g. feeling too distinct from others, Uldall et al.,
unpublished data, cited by [5]) mimic a subsequent interaction
partner more than people in a control condition. Here, it is
claimed that ostracism or isolation primes strongly activate one’s
goal/desire to affiliate with others, and thus lead to more mimicry
behavior. However, if priming either with prosocial concepts (e.g.
affiliative words) or antisocial concepts (e.g. disaffiliation threat)
can lead to increased mimicry, it becomes hard to make specific
predictions about the direction of priming effects.
Looking more broadly at priming of behavior (not just mimicry),
an increasing number of studies showed contrast results in prime-
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e
to-behavior effects where the prime-induced behavior is the
opposite of the primed goal or concept. For example, early studies
suggest that priming of the concept of ‘‘elderly’’ caused
participants to walk slower and priming of the concept of
intelligence caused participants to perform better on an intellectual
task [16,19]. However, Dijksterhuis et al., [20] found that priming
with an exemplar of an older person (e.g. the 89 year old Dutch
Queen Mother) or an exemplar of an intelligent person (e.g.
Einstein) can lead to the opposite effect, with quicker walking
speed and worse performance on the intellectual task.
Dijksterhuis et al., [21] suggest these opposing effects can be
best understood in terms of how the prime is processed in relation
to the self, and Wheeler et al. [22] takes this further in defining the
role of the self-concept in the control of prime-to-behavior effects.
In their ‘active-self’ model (see a review [23]), it is proposed that
the representation of the self-concept has two components, the
chronic self-concept and active self-concept. The chronic self-
concept concerns all of the self-concept information that is stored
in long-term memory, whereas the active self-concept refers to a
subset of chronic self-concept content that is currently accessible
and active and used to guide behavior. The active self-concept can
shift rapidly in response to environmental perceptual inputs, and
thus primed constructs could affect behavior by altering the active
self-concept.
There are several differences between goal-activation theory
[16] and active-self theory [23]. First, the goal-activation theory
suggests that prime constructs directly activate goal representations
with no intervening processes. In contrast, the active-self theory
suggests that the prime-to-behavior effects are mediated by active
self-concept. Prime constructs first influence one’s understanding
of the self, which then activates corresponding behavioral
representation. This means that the interplay between the prime
and the ‘self’ determines which behavioral representation will
guide behavior.
Second, these two theories make different predictions for prime-
to-behavior effects. The goal-activation theory predicts that primes
should directly activate congruent goals leading to congruent
behavior. This theory can only account for cases where behavior is
incongruent with the priming material by suggesting that this
priming material engaged a different goal. In contrast, the active-
self model allows both congruent and incongruent behavior to
occur, depending on how the primed construct interacts with the
active self-concept. This means that many potential modulators of
the active self-concept (e.g. self-comparison, self-relatedness,
perspective-taking) can influence that prime-to-behavior effect
despite being independent of the primed concept. For example,
although priming intelligence-related words such as ‘smart’ usually
induces an assimilative self-concept (i.e. ‘I am smart’) and
assimilative behavior (i.e. better performance in a following
intellectual task), priming concrete and distinct intelligent exem-
plars such as ‘Einstein’ induces a contrasting self-concept (i.e. ‘I am
no Einstein, I am not smart, I am dumb.’) and contrasting
behavior (i.e. bad performance in the intellectual task) [20]. Thus,
the active-self model permits the prediction of a wide range of
effects that are not easily derived from the direct goal-activation
framework.
Previous studies examined the active-self model mainly in
stereotype-related behavior, e.g. ‘Einstein and intelligent behavior’
[24], ‘elderly exemplars and walking speed behavior’ [25,26] and
‘African-Americans and aggression behavior’ [27]. In the present
paper, we examine if this model is also relevant to priming of
stereotype-unrelated behavior such as mimicry. The flexibility of
the active-self model suggests that it could provide a powerful
means to explain previous mixed results where both prosocial and
antisocial primes lead to more mimicry. However, this has not yet
been tested directly. Here we report three experiments which
examined the effect of prosocial and antisocial primes on mimicry
behavior, while maintaining careful control of the self-relatedness
of the primes.
Unlike many previous studies of social priming on automatic
behaviors where the impact of the prime was measured on a
single, natural setting task (e.g. walking speed [19] or number of
mimicry actions [9]), our approach in present study builds on the
recent finding that mimicry responses can be recorded in more
carefully controlled lab tasks (i.e. the stimulus-response compat-
ibility tasks) with multiple trials per participants (see a review paper
[28]) and that these lab tasks show the same priming effects as
natural encounters [11–13,29]. In particular, we chose the ‘finger-
tapping task’ to measure mimicry [30–32] where participants had
to move their index or middle finger in response to a number while
viewing incongruent or congruent finger movements on a
computer screen. Previous research found faster responses to
congruent than incongruent actions and took this congruency
effect as an accurate and reliable measure of mimicry [28]. Here
we aim to examine how prosocial and antisocial primes influence
this congruency effect, whether via goal-activation or active self-
concept.
Experiment 1
Experiment 1 was primarily a pilot study which aimed to test if
priming with pro/antisocial sentences has an impact on mimicry
as measured with our finger tapping task. This provides a basic
manipulation check of the validity of our approach. Our design is
very similar to Leighton et al. [11], though this study was
conducted before we were aware of Leighton’s findings. Partic-
ipants first completed a traditional scrambled sentences task (‘the
priming stage’) and then took a finger-tapping task (‘the mimicry
recording stage’). The scrambled sentences described either
prosocial interactions or antisocial interaction between two
characters. For example, one prosocial prime was ‘Larry shares
his chocolate ice cream with Kitty; one antisocial prime was ‘Eric
plays loud music to interrupt Sarah studying’. Non-social, factual
sentences were also used as a control condition (e.g. ‘A rainbow is
made of seven different colours’). Unlike the between-subjects
priming design in Leighton et al. [11], here we used a within-
subjects design which presented all priming stimuli (prosocial,
antisocial and non-social) to each participant in different blocks, to
remove effects due to individual difference in mimicry. We
expected that priming with prosocial interactions would give
participants the goal to affiliate and lead to stronger mimicry as
shown by Leighton et al., [11]. However, our results surprised us
and lead us to conduct the studies reported later.
Participants Nineteen students (average age 23.8; S.D. 2.81 years; 14 women
and 5 men) took part in Experiment 1. All were right-handed,
proficient in the English language, had normal or corrected-to-
normal vision and naı̈ve as to the purpose of the study. This
experiment was approved by the Ethics Committee of the school
of psychology of the University of Nottingham. Participants gave
written consent to participate in this experiment and were paid for
their participation.
Methods and materials The priming manipulation was presented in the form of the
‘‘Scrambled Sentence Test’’ [33] in an A4 booklet. For each test
sentence, two words were already presented in the correct order in
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the answer sheet and participants were required to use the other
six words out of a list of seven to construct a grammatically and
semantically correct eight-word sentence. Three types of scram-
bled-sentences were constructed (Figure 1): one was designed to
prime prosocial behavior between two fictional characters (e.g.,
‘‘John gives Laura a warm and affectionate hug’’, ‘‘Frank and
Mary cooperate to make model planes’’); another was to prime
participants with an antisocial behavior between two characters
(e.g., ‘‘Sam makes Jane weep for a long time’’, ‘‘Paul destroys
Angelina’s new toy train on purpose’’), and a third was intended to
prime neutral non-social information (e.g., ‘‘A rainbow is made of
seven different colours’’, ‘‘London is the capital of the United
Kingdom’’) (see Text S1 for all sentences).
Participants completed one page at a time from the booklet.
Each page contained four sentences and they were all designed to
prime the same category of social behaviors (prosocial, antisocial
or non-social). Participants could use pencil to write anything on
the page for assistance but had to complete the four sentences as
quickly as possible. In order to consolidate the priming effect,
participants were also required to read their answers to the
experimenter for a correction check when they finished each page.
To measure spontaneous mimicry, we used a ‘‘finger tapping
task’’ [30,31,34]. On each trial, two-frame video sequences of a left
hand were displayed on a computer monitor (Figure 1). The first
frame showed a left hand resting above a desk, with a white box
superimposed on the hand. The second frame showed one of two
numbers (1 or 2) on the white box and meanwhile the left hand
was performing an finger tapping movement either using index
finger or middle finger. The left hand in the video was oriented to
appear like a mirror reflection of the participant’s own right hand.
Using their dominant right hand, participants were instructed to
press a key with the index finger if they saw number 1 in the white
box, and press a key with the middle finger if they saw number 2 in
the white box. They were asked to always respond to the number
cue as fast as they can and ignore the hand action in the
background. The interval between two frames varied (600, 1200,
1800 ms) to prevent anticipatory responding.
Trials were organized in three types. In congruent trials, the
hand in the video frame executed an identical finger movement to
the instructed movement (e.g. number 1 + see index finger movement), while in incongruent trials the movement executed by
the hand on the screen was different from the instructed
movement (e.g. number 2 + see index finger movement). In baseline trials, the hand on the screen did not perform any hand
movement, but the number still appeared. Past studies found that
observing an action automatically activates the motor represen-
tation of that action [31,32]. Therefore in congruent trials reaction
times are facilitated by the mimicry of observed action.
Incongruent trials lead to slower responses because the required
action must be enforced over the natural tendency to mimic.
Figure 1. Examples of the priming sentences in the scrambled-sentence task and the hand movement stimuli in the finger-taping task. Each time participants had to complete one page of scrambled sentences describing pro/anti/non-social behaviours on a booklet and then one block of finger tapping task on a computer where they had to respond to a number cue in the middle of the screen and ignored a congruent/ incongruent/still hand movement stimuli on the background. They had to complete twelve pages of scrambled-sentence task and twelve blocks of finger tapping task alternately. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060249.g001
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Mimicry is assessed by calculating the congruency effect (CE)—the
reaction time difference between congruent trials and incongruent
trials [11–13,28,35]. There were 12 incongruent trials, 12
congruent trials and 12 baselines in each block of the finger
tapping task and they were presented in a pseudo-randomized
order.
Design and procedure Participants were told that they were taking part in two
independent tests of language proficiency and motor control
ability, and that the two tests would be alternated to reduce
boredom [36]. They had to complete twelve pages of the
scrambled-sentence task alternating with twelve blocks of the
finger tapping task. The order of the priming pages was fully
counterbalanced across participants to prevent practice or carry-
over effects impacting on the results. At the end of the study,
participants were debriefed to ascertain whether they had guessed
the purpose of the experiment.
In order to make participants familiar with these two tasks, they
performed a practice session before all the testing sessions. There
were three scrambled sentences for practice, each exemplifying
one type of priming (prosocial, antisocial and non-social). A short
version of the finger tapping task was also prepared for practice,
with 5 incongruent trials, 5 congruent trials and 5 baselines trials
in a pseudo-randomized order. Cogent running in Matlab was
used to present the finger tapping task and record data.
Results To remove trials where participants did not attend to the
number stimuli, incorrect responses (0.10%) were excluded from
the analysis, as were all RTs smaller than 100 ms or greater
800 ms (0.48%). To minimize the effect of outliers, we also
excluded RTs that were greater than two standard deviations from
the conditional means of each participant (0.36%). The congru-
ency effect (CE) for each participant was calculated by subtracting
reaction time (RT) in congruent trials from RT in incongruent
trials. Figure 2 shows both CE and RT data for each priming
group.
In order to test whether mimicry was influenced by the priming
sentences in our experimental task, a repeated measures analysis of
variance (ANOVA) was conducted on mean RT with congruency
(congruent, incongruent, baseline) and primes (prosocial, antiso-
cial, non-social) as variables. The analysis revealed a significant
main effect of congruency (F(2,36) = 26.3, p,0.001) with a faster response in congruent trials (M = 429 ms, S.E. 30.24) and a slower
response in incongruent trials (M = 447 ms, S.E. 35.2); the
response in baseline trials was intermediate (M = 436 ms, S.E.
30.5). This main effect of congruency confirmed the success of
mimicry measurement in our experimental task. In addition, the
ANOVA also revealed a significant interaction between congru-
ency and primes (F(4,72) = 3.52, p,0.011), which suggests that mimicry was modulated by the priming sentences. In order to test
whether this congruency 6 primes interaction was mainly driven by congruent and incongruent conditions, but not the baseline
condition, we further conducted a repeated measures ANOVA on
baseline trials only, with primes (prosocial, antisocial, non-social)
as variables. No significant main effect of primes was found on
baseline trials (F(2, 36) = 2.20, p = 0.126), which suggests that the
interaction was driven by the congruent and incongruent
conditions.
To further examine the priming effect on mimicry, a repeated
measures ANOVA was conducted on mean CE with primes
(prosocial, antisocial, non-social) as variables. The analysis
revealed a significant main effect of primes on CE
(F(2,36) = 4.76, p,0.015) (Figure 2A), which is consistent with previous congruency 6primes interaction on RT. Specifically, the antisocial priming group induced a stronger CE (M = 25.7 ms,
S.E. 18.0) than the non-social (M = 14.8 ms, S.E. 11.8) and
prosocial priming group (M = 13.6 ms, S.E. 18.0). Post hoc t-test
showed the CE in antisocial priming group is significantly larger
than the one in non-social (t (18) = 2.52, p,0.022) and in prosocial priming group (t (18) = 2.81, p,0.012), but there was no difference between the prosocial and non-social priming groups (t (18) = 0.24,
p = 0.813).
Discussion The results of experiment 1 surprised us. Priming with
scrambled sentences describing pro and anti-social behaviors did
impact on mimicry, but not in the predicted direction. Our data
showed a prime-incongruent effect on mimicry that participants
had stronger mimicry following antisocial priming than prosocial
and non-social priming (Figure 2A). These results contradict the
very similar study by Leighton et al. [11], which found stronger
mimicry following prosocial priming in the same task. It is
Figure 2. Results in Experiment 1. (A) Mean Congruency Effect (CE) for the three types of priming (prosocial antisocial and non-social). Asterisks represent the statistically significant difference between two bars. Vertical bars indicate standard error. (B) Mean Reaction Time in milliseconds (ms) for participants in each of the three priming groups on congruent, incongruent and baseline trials. Italic numbers indicate standard deviation. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060249.g002
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therefore important to understand why our study yielded results
which contrast so strongly with Leighton’s study.
One possible reason is simply that our study and Leighton’s
were conducted in different labs with different experimental
setups. For example, we used a within-subjects design whereas
Leighton used a between-subjects design, and we used finger-
tapping task while they used a hand-opening task. These
explanations seem unlikely. Instead, we hypothesized that the
different results are due to some subtle factors in the priming
sentences themselves. Our study only used very concrete prime
sentences which were unrelated to the self. Participants read about
two people in harmony/conflict but were not engaged in the
harmony/conflict themselves (e.g. ‘‘John gives Laura a warm and
affectionate hug’’, ‘‘Robin harshly blames the project failure on
Amy’’). In contrast, Leighton’s priming stimuli were more abstract
and self-related sentences and participants were to some extent
involved in the primes (e.g. ‘‘She is my friend’’, ‘‘We are against
this’’). The idea that the self-relatedness of the prime influences the
direction of the priming effects is not easy to understand under the
goal-activation theory, but can potentially be explained by the
active-self account. This account emphasizes the importance of the
‘self’ in determining the magnitude and direction of priming effects
on behavior [23]. Under this account, the difference in self-
relatedness of the priming sentences could lead to assimilative or
contrasting prime-to-behavior effects and thus account for the
different results between Leighton’s study and ours. Experiment 2
tests this possibility.
Experiment 2
In experiment 2, we aim to examine whether the contrast effects
in experiment 1 come from the self-relatedness of the primes. We
produced entirely new two sets of scrambled sentences with pro/
anti/social primes but manipulated the self-relatedness of those
primes. Specifically, the first set described the pro/anti social
behaviors from the third-person perspective, just like the sentences
in experiment 1 (e.g. ‘‘Greg encourages others to be friends with
Lauren’’, ‘‘Joe cruelly bullied Stephanie about her weight
problem’’). The second set used the same structure, but each
sentence was modified by replacing the first character with ‘I’ or
‘we’ and thus presented the behavior from the first-person
perspective (e.g. ‘‘We encourage others to be friends with
Lauren’’). In the antisocial sentences, ‘I’ or ‘we’ was always the
protagonist rather than the victim of the antisocial behavior (‘‘I
cruelly bullied Stephanie about her weight problem’’). In this way,
all the pro/antisocial behaviors in the first-person and third-person
perspective version were identical, except that the former were
self-related and the latter were not.
As previous studies found that priming from self-focus or first-
person-perspective-taking enhances assimilative behavior whereas
priming from other-focus or third-person-perspective-taking
enhances contrasting behavior [22,23,27,37–40], we predicted
that the third-person group would replicate the contrast priming
effects in Experiment 1 where more mimicry was induced by third-
person antisocial primes than by third-person prosocial primes. In
contrast, priming from a first-person perspective should allow the
primed concept to be assimilated into the participant’s behavior,
so that first-person prosocial primes should induce more mimicry
behavior. This would replicate the pattern of previous studies
where prosocial primes induce more mimicry than antisocial
primes [9–11].
Participants Thirty-two right-handed, native English speaking undergradu-
ate students (average age 20.4; S.D. 1.88 years; 22 women and 10
men) participated in Experiment 2. None of them had participated
in Experiment 1. Half of the participants (11 women and 5 men)
were randomly assigned to the 3rd person perspective group, the
other half to the 1 st
person perspective group. Again, this
experiment was approved by the Ethics Committee of the school
of psychology of the University of Nottingham. Participants gave
written consent to participate in this experiment and were paid for
their participation.
Methods, materials, design and procedure These were the same as those in experiment 1, except that two
new sets of scrambled-sentence task were prepared for each
perspective-taking group. For the third person perspective group,
12 pages of entirely new scrambled sentences were remade: 4
pages of prosocial behavior priming, 4 pages of antisocial behavior
priming and 4 pages of non-social priming (see Text S2 for all
sentences). For the first person perspective group, we adopted the
same sentences but just changed the first character’s name into ‘‘I’’
or ‘‘We’’. The non-social priming sentences in first and third
person group were the same.
Results The same procedure as Experiment 1 was implemented on raw
RT data, to remove incorrect responses (0.08%) and RT outliers
(0.93%). First, in order to examine whether self-relatedness can
alter the priming effects on mimicry, a three-way repeated
measures ANOVA was conducted on participants‘ mean RT,
with congruency (congruent, incongruent, baseline), primes
(prosocial, antisocial, non-social) and self-relatedness (3 rd -person,
1 st -person) as variables (Figure 3A). The three-way ANOVA
analysis revealed a significant main effect of congruency
(F(2,60) = 51.34, p,0.001) and a significant three-way interaction: congruency 6 primes 6 self-relatedness (F(4,120) = 4.84, p,0.001). Second, in order to test whether this three-way interaction was mainly driven by congruent and incongruent
conditions, but not the baseline condition, we conducted a
repeated measures ANOVA on baseline trials only, with primes
(prosocial, antisocial, non-social) and self-relatedness (3rd-person,
1st-person) as variables. The result showed no interaction between
primes and self-relatedness on baseline trials (F(2,60) = 1.55,
p = 0.221), which suggests that the three-way interaction was
driven by the congruent and incongruent conditions.
We then performed a two-way ANOVA on participants’ CE
with primes (prosocial, antisocial, non-social) and self-relatedness
(3rd-person, 1st-person) as variables. In line with the three-way
interaction on RT, the two-way ANOVA analysis on CE revealed
a significant main effect of primes (F(2,60) = 3.80, p,0.028) and a significant two-way interaction: primes 6 self-relatedness (F(2,60) = 14.13, p,0.001). These results suggest that the priming effects on mimicry between two perspective-taking groups were
significantly different.
In order to further examine the specific priming effect on
mimicry in each perspective-taking group, we conducted a
repeated measures ANOVA analysis for each group, on mean
CE with primes (prosocial, antisocial, non-social) as variables. The
analysis revealed a significant main effect of primes on CE in both
3 rd -person (F(2,30) = 11.87, p,0.001) and 1
st -person
(F(2,30) = 6.59, p,0.004) group (Figure 3B). For 3 rd -person group,
post-hoc t-test showed that the CE in antisocial priming condition
was significantly larger than the one in prosocial (t (15) = 5.02,
p,0.001) and non-social (t (15) = 3.53, p,0.003) priming condi-
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tion, which replicated the results in experiment 1. In contrast,
post-hoc t-test in 1 st -person group showed that CE in prosocial
priming condition was significantly larger than the one in
antisocial priming condition (t (15) = 3.32, p,0.005) and non- social (t (15) = 3.16, p,0.007) priming condition, which was compatible with the findings of Leighton et al. 2010. When we
directly compared the priming effects on CE between two self-
relatedness groups, we found that antisocial priming effect was
significantly larger in the 3 rd
person group than in the 1 st person
group (t(30) = 2.87, p,0.007) while prosocial priming effect was significantly smaller in the 3
rd person group than in the 1
st person
group (t(30) = 2.17, p,0.039); the priming effects in two non-social priming conditions were not significantly different (t (30) = 0.002,
p = 0.998).
Discussion The results in Experiment 2 clearly show that self-relatedness
determines the direction of the social priming on mimicry. Just as
we predicted, the results in third-person group replicated the
contrasting priming effect in experiment 1 with a new group of
participants; and the results in first-person group replicated the
assimilative pattern in Leighton and previous studies. Specifically,
antisocial behavior primes increase mimicry only in the third-
person group whereas prosocial behavior primes increase mimicry
only in the first–person group. These results demonstrate that the
differences between the results of Leighton et al [11] and our
experiment 1 are due to the self-relatedness of the primes, and not
to other extraneous factors. The data also support the active-self
model of priming effects, rather than a goal-activation model.
Before considering the theoretical implications of this result in
detail, we wanted to confirm its robustness and reliability. In
particular, we aimed to test if this same response pattern can be
obtained with a different priming method.
Experiment 3
In Experiment 3, we aimed to test whether the results in
Experiment 2 can be replicated by using other priming methods.
Instead of using the scrambled sentence task, we developed a novel
video priming approach where participants first watched cartoon
movies depicting pro-/antisocial behavior between three animate
shapes (i.e. helper, hinderer, and bystander) and then completed a
story-telling task. This non-verbal priming method is based on the
finding that adults and children can perceive the behavior of
simple animate shapes in terms of complex interactions such as
theory of mind and prosocial behavior [41,42]. Observation of
animate shapes behaving in pro/antisocial fashion can prime pro/
antisocial behavior in children [18,42]. In order to manipulate the
self-relatedness of the social primes, here participants were
required to take the perspective of one animate shape when
watching the video and to describe the story from that shape’s
point view in the story-telling task. For example, if participants
were going to be primed with self-related prosocial behavior, they
would be asked to watch a prosocial video from the perspective of
the helper and to tell the story from the helper’s point of view; in
contrast, if participants were going to be primed with self-
unrelated antisocial behavior, they would be asked to watch an
antisocial video from the perspective of a bystander and to
describe the story as they were the bystander shape. Compared to
the scrambled sentence task, participants were never exposed to
any pre-defined pro/antisocial words; instead, they chose their
own way to describe their understanding of the pro/antisocial
videos. Therefore, this approach provided a more natural, vivid
and ecologically valid way to present social primes.
Unlike the between-subject design of experiment 2 where
participants were randomly allocated into two perspective-taking
groups, here we used a fully within-subject design for the priming
of prosociality and self-relatedness (i.e. each participant had both
first and third person perspective when watching the pro/
antisocial videos). This allows us to remove possible individual
differences in performance, and prepare for future neuroimaging
studies. We predict that, like experiment 2, prosocial cartoon
primes increase mimicry only when viewed from a first-person
perspective and antisocial cartoon primes increase mimicry only
when viewed from a third-person perspective.
Participants Eighteen right-handed, native English speaking undergraduate
students (average age 20.1; S.D. 1.49 years; 11 women and 7 men)
participated in Experiment 3. None of them had participated in
Experiment 1 or 2. The experiment was approved by the Ethics
Committee of the school of psychology of the University of
Nottingham. Participants gave written consent to participate in
this experiment and were paid for their participation.
Methods and materials We adopted a cartoon movie paradigm [42] to prime pro/
antisocial behavior. Two scenarios of simple social interactions
were provided. In Scenario A (see Figure 4A), participants saw a
character (the ‘‘triangle shape’’) initially at the bottom of a hill and
then repeatedly attempted to push a football up onto the hill. On
Figure 3. Results in Experiment 2. (A) Mean reaction time in milliseconds (ms) for participants in each of two perspective-taking groups (3rd person and 1st person), each of three priming groups (prosocial, antisocial and non-social), and each of three congruency conditions (congruent, incongruent and baseline trials). Italic numbers indicate standard deviation (B) Mean CE for participants in each of two perspective-taking groups and each of three priming groups. Asterisks represent the statistically significant difference between two bars. Vertical bars indicate standard error. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060249.g003
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the third attempt, the ball-pusher was either aided up by a helper
(the ‘sphere’ shape) who pushed it from behind (‘‘prosocial’’
condition), or was resisted by a hinderer (the ‘‘pentagon’’ shape)
who pushed the ball down to the bottom of the hill (‘‘antisocial’’
condition). In Scenario B (see Figure 4B), participants saw a
character (the ‘‘square shape’’) initially outside of a doughnut
house and then repeatedly attempted to get into the house by
pushing the stone out of the way to the entrance. On the third
attempt, the stone-pusher was either aided by a helper (the
‘‘triangle’’ shape) who pushed it from behind (‘‘prosocial’’
condition), or was resisted by a hinderer (the ‘‘sphere’’ shape)
who pushed the stone from the opposite direction (‘‘antisocial’’
condition).
There were eight types of cartoon movie (Figure 4) and each
movie lasted 30 seconds. Each movie involved three cartoon
characters with human-like eyes: a ball/stone pusher, a helper/
hinderer, and a bystander (always sits at the left-bottom of the
movie). Either the helper/hinderer or the bystander was coloured
yellow and the other shapes were white.
Design and procedure Participants were ostensibly told that they were going to
complete two independent tasks: a story telling task to measure
their language ability and a finger tapping task to measure their
motor control ability. In the story-telling task, participants were
required to imagine themselves as the yellow-colored cartoon
character when watching the movie and afterwards to write down
the story from that point of view. In half of the movies, the helper/
hinderer was yellow-colored, so participants had to write down the
pro-/anti-social story from a first-person perspective. In the other
half where the bystander was yellow-colored, participants had to
write down the pro-/anti- social story from a third-person
perspective. To assure the perspective-taking manipulation,
participants were asked to describe the story in a pre-defined
structure. For example, when participants were watching a
prosocial story from a first-person perspective (see Figure 4A,
up-left), they had to complete sentences like this: ‘‘The white
sphere is trying to……; and I am trying to……’’; when
participants watching an antisocial story from a third person
perspective (see Figure 4A, down-right), they had to complete
sentences like this: ‘‘I am watching……; The white sphere is trying
to……; The white triangle is trying to……’’. This design allows us
to enforce perspective taking without ever using the words
‘‘helper’’ or ‘‘hinder’’ or other pro/antisocial labels to the
participants.
Each participant had to complete eight story telling task (2
scenarios62 pro/antisocial priming62 perspective-taking) alter- nating with eight blocks of the finger tapping task. The order of the
cartoon movies was fully counterbalanced across participants to
prevent practice or carry-over effects impacting on the results. The
finger tapping task in Experiment 3 was identical to previous two
experiments (i.e. 12 incongruent, 12 congruent and 12 baseline
trials in a block of the finger tapping task and they were in a
pseudo-randomized order). At the end of the study, participants
were debriefed to ascertain whether they had guessed the purpose
of the experiment.
Results and Discussion The same procedure as Experiment 1 and 2 was implemented
on raw RT data, to remove incorrect responses (0.15%) and RT
Figure 4. Pro/antisocial cartoons in Experiment 3. (A) In scenario A, participants saw a character (the ‘triangle shape’) initially at the bottom of a hill and attempted to push a football up onto the hill twice, each time falling back to the bottom of the hill. On the third attempt, the ball-pusher was either aided up by a helper (the ‘sphere’ shape) who pushed it from behind (‘prosocial scene’), or was resisted by a hinderer (the ‘pentagon’ shape) who pushed the ball down to the bottom of the hill (‘antisocial’ scene). There was also a bystander (the ‘square’ shape) standing at the top of another hill, watching the whole pro/antisocial behavior happening. (B) In Scenario B, participants saw a character (the ‘square shape’) initially outside of a doughnut house and then repeatedly attempted to get into the house by pushing the stone out of the way to the entrance. On the third attempt, the stone-pusher was either aided by a helper (the ‘triangle’ shape) who pushed it from behind (‘prosocial’ scene), or was resisted by a hinderer (the ‘sphere’ shape) who pushed the stone from the opposite direction (‘antisocial’ scene). There was also a bystander (the ‘pentagon’ shape) standing at the left-bottom corner, watching the whole pro/antisocial behavior happening. In all scenarios, the participant was asked to describe the story from the point of view of the yellow shape, which could be either the helper/hinder (first-person) or the bystander (third-person). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060249.g004
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outliers (0.85%). First, in order to examine whether perspective-
taking can alter the priming effects on mimicry, a three-way
repeated measures ANOVA was conducted on participants’ mean
RT, with congruency (congruent, incongruent, baseline), primes
(prosocial, antisocial) and perspective-taking (first-person, third-
person) as variables (Figure 5A). The three-way ANOVA analysis
revealed a significant main effect of congruency (F(2,34) = 19.05,
p,0.001) and a significant three-way interaction: congruency 6 primes 6 perspective-taking (F(2,34) = 10.17, p,0.001). Second, in order to test whether this three-way interaction was mainly
driven by congruent and incongruent conditions, but not the
baseline condition, we conducted a repeated measures ANOVA
on baseline trials only, with primes (prosocial, antisocial) and self-
relatedness (3rd-person, 1st-person) as variables. The result
showed no interaction between primes and self-relatedness in
baseline condition (F(1,17) = 0.811, p = 0.380), which suggests that
the early three-way interaction was driven by the congruent and
incongruent conditions.
We then performed a two-way ANOVA on participants’ CE
with primes (prosocial, antisocial) and perspective-taking (first-
person, third-person) as variables. In line with the three-way
interaction on RT, the two-way ANOVA analysis revealed a
significant two-way interaction on CE: primes 6 perspective- taking (F(1,17) = 27.59, p,0.001)(Figure 5B). For the third-person
group, post-hoc t-test showed that the CE in antisocial condition
was significantly larger than the one in prosocial condition (t
(17) = 2.42, p,0.027). For the first-person group, the CE in prosocial condition was significantly larger than the one in
antisocial condition (t (17) = 3.07, p,0.007). When comparing the pro/antisocial priming effects between two perspective-taking
groups, we found that the CE in third-person antisocial condition
was significantly larger than the one in first-person antisocial
condition (t (17) = 3.89, p,0.001) and the CE in third-person prosocial condition was significantly smaller than the one first-
person prosocial condition (t (17) = 2.27, p,0.037). Taken together, these results replicate previous results in Experiment 1
and 2 by using a new priming method, and suggest that the
antisocial primes enhance mimicry only in third-person perspec-
tive while prosocial primes enhance mimicry only in first-person
perspective.
General Discussion
In the present study, we investigate the underlying mechanism
of social priming on mimicry. Three experiments provide
converging evidence that the self-relatedness of a prime substan-
tially influences the social priming of mimicry. Specifically,
experiment 1 demonstrated a surprising contrast priming effects
on mimicry. By using third-person pro/antisocial primes, we
found antisocial primes induce stronger mimicry than prosocial
primes. In experiment 2, we further verified that priming with
first-person prosocial sentences increases mimicry, but priming
with third-person antisocial sentences also increases mimicry.
Finally, in experiment 3, we replicated the same results of
experiment 2 by using a new cartoon priming approach. Again,
prosocial primes increase mimicry only when participants take a
first-person perspective and antisocial primes increase mimicry
only when participants take a third-person perspective. Taken
together, these findings provide direct evidence that the self-
relatedness of a prime has a critical role in the control of mimicry
behavior.
These results are important for several reasons. First they may
help us understand why some priming studies yield mixed results,
and point to more effective methods for the study of priming.
Second, they can help us discriminate between different theories of
the control of mimicry and the priming of automatic behavior.
Finally, they lead to several new predictions and future directions.
Methodological Implications Our findings that prosocial primes do not always enhance
mimicry have important methodological implications for future
priming research on mimicry. Previous studies only control the
prosociality of the scrambled sentences (e.g. contains prosocial or
antisocial words), but did not control other factors of the sentences
such as first and third person pronoun (e.g. ‘‘he’’, ‘‘they’’, ‘‘I’’,
‘‘we’’) [10–13]. In the current study, our results revealed that self-
unrelated primes lead to contrasting effects whereas self-related
primes lead to assimilative effects (Figure 3 and 5). This suggests
that mimicry is not only sensitive to the pro/antisocial words in the
priming sentences, but also the self-relatedness of the primed
content. Future studies using tasks like the scrambled sentences
task to provide conceptual priming must thus consider the whole
meaning of each sentence, not just the presence of key pro/
antisocial words. It is possible that failure to control for the self-
relatedness of primes could account for at least some of the mixed
results and failure-to-replicate in the priming literature [43].
Our paper also validates a non-verbal priming task (i.e.
experiment 3, cartoon movie priming) and shows that this task
Figure 5. Results in Experiment 3. (A) Mean reaction time in milliseconds (ms) for participants in each of two perspective-taking groups (3rd person and 1st person), each of two priming groups (prosocial and antisocial), and each of three congruency conditions (congruent, incongruent and baseline trials). Italic numbers indicate standard deviation (B) Mean CE for participants in each of two perspective-taking groups and each of two priming groups. Asterisks represent the statistically significant difference between two bars. Vertical bars indicate standard error. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060249.g005
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influences behavior in just the same way as a more traditional
scrambled sentences task. In this task, participants viewed video
clips showing pro/anti-social behavior [42] and then wrote down a
description of what they saw from a particular viewpoint. This is
potentially useful when studying populations where language
ability is more limited, such as children [18] or those with autism
[13]. Finally, we show that it is possible to obtain robust priming
effects using within-subjects design. Although we found relatively
small congruency effects compared to previous studies[11–13],
these priming effects were reliably replicated across three studies.
This opens the way to study the neural mechanisms of social
priming using functional MRI.
Theories of prime-to-behaviour effects The automatic mimicry of another person’s action can be
considered a special class of perception-action mapping [44].
Numerous studies over the last decade have examined how
different priming contexts have subtle effects on behavior. The
dominant explanation of these priming effects is based on the idea
of goal-activation [16] which claims that a given prime directly
activates a goal, which then automatically leads to pursuit of that
goal. Applying this to the case of mimicry and social primes, it is
proposed that when participants are exposed to words related to
the concept of affiliation, they activate an affiliation goal and then
show more affiliative behavior including more mimicry [9,15].
However, this goal-activation theory cannot easily account for
the interaction between the prosocial nature of the prime and the
self-relatedness of the prime, which we demonstrate in three
studies here. There must be an additional self-related processing
step in between the perception of a prime and its impact on
behavior. This idea of indirect prime-to-behavior relationship is
consistent with the active-self model [23], which proposes that
prime-behavior effects are mediated by the concept of the self.
This model can account for some prime-incongruent behavior in
priming literature where priming with an abstract concept (e.g.
‘‘professor’’) lead to an assimilative behavior (e.g. higher intelli-
gence performance) while priming with a concrete exemplar (e.g.
‘‘Einstein’’) leads to a contrasting behavior (e.g. lower intelligence
performance) [20].
The active-self theory can also account for assimilative and
contrasting priming effects in our data. There are four different
conditions which we must consider. First, we suggest that when
participants read or imagine a prosocial scenario from a first-
person point of view, they assimilative this prosocial attitude into
their sense of self and show more mimicry in the subsequent
mimicry task. As previous studies using abstract primes always
report prime-congruent effects on mimicry (i.e. ‘prosocial prime
leads to more mimicry’, [9–11], we suggest that this first-person
perspective could be the default perspective for abstract stimuli.
Second, we suggest that when participants read or imagine an
antisocial scenario from a first-person point of view, the imposed
anti-social self conflicts with the participant’s default concept of
themselves as a prosocial person. This means they reject the feeling
of being antisocial and do not change their behavior. Thus,
mimicry levels following first-person antisocial priming are similar
to non-social priming (Figure 3B). It is worth noting that in
Leighton’s study, antisocial abstract priming lead to less mimicry
than neutral priming, whereas in our study, antisocial first-person
priming did not decrease mimicry below neutral priming (see
Figure 3B). It is possible that the very concrete first-person
antisocial primes used in our study lead to strong conflict with the
default prosocial self-concept which causes the primes not to be
assimilated [45]. In contrast, when participants are exposed to
Leighton’s abstract antisocial primes, there is less conflict between
their naturally prosocial self and the primed antisocial concept,
leading to stronger assimilation of the prime and less mimicry.
Third, we consider the case where participants read or imagine
an antisocial scenario from a third-person point of view and then
show increased mimicry behavior (experiment 1–3 here). There
are two possible explanations. First, exposure to third party
conflict might motivate participant to prepare to mend the
situation and increase social harmony [46–49], and the participant
would then show increased mimicry [18]. This is a complex but
still primarily goal-motivational account of the results. Alterna-
tively, exposure to third party conflict might lead the participant to
engage an implicit self-comparison process (similar to the ‘Einstein’
example) and to feel ‘I am not nasty like that’ [50]. This process
would prime participants with a prosocial self-concept (e.g. ‘I
would not do that antisocial behavior to others, I am a prosocial
guy’) and then lead them showing more mimicry. This is a self-
based account of the results. Present data do not entirely
distinguish these, but we suggest the active-self account is more
parsimonious and more general because it can explain both the
present data and previous results [20].
Finally, when participants read or imagine a prosocial scenario
from a third-person point of view, they do not need to heal the
social situation, nor do they feel the behavior they view is unlike
themselves (note that no self-comparison process would be
activated here because those prosocial behavior in the primes
could be very common in participants’ own behavioral repertoire).
Therefore, their motivation to mimic and sense of self remain
unchanged, and levels of mimicry remain the same as baseline
(experiment 1 and 2).
Overall, our data demonstrate that the self-relatedness of a
prime is critical in determining how that prime influences
behavior. We suggest that the active-self model provides a possible
account for this result, and that the influence of primes on
behavior cannot be as simple as directly activating a single goal
that matches the social valence of the primed concepts. Further
study will be needed to determine exactly what additional self-
related processes are engaged when primes influence mimicry
behavior.
Future research implications It is interesting to discuss the relationship between the social
priming effects on mimicry and those social/non-social priming
effects on executive functions [51,52]. Although attention is an
important factor in the stimulus-response compatibility paradigm
(i.e. the finger tapping task), it is very unlikely that the social
priming effect on mimicry results from attentional processes (see
detailed discussion in [11]). Similarly, although the successful
performance of the finger tapping task requires good inhibition in
incongruent trials, strong evidence suggests that the effect we
found in present studies is different from the priming effects on
cognitive control. Brass et al. [53,54] conducted two studies where
they functionally and anatomically dissociate the inhibition of
mimicry from cognitive control processes (e.g. Stroop task, go-no
go task). Their recent study further suggests that social processes
for self-other distinction plays a fundamental role in the inhibition
of mimicry [7]. Consistent with that, our findings suggest that the
social priming of mimicry is more likely based on specific social
processes for the ‘self’ rather than domain-general executive
functions.
Our conclusions that social priming of mimicry is mediated by
active self-concept are also consistent with recent social priming
studies on adolescent and autistic populations. Cook & Bird
[12,13] found adults with autism and young adolescents show less
mimicry after prosocial priming than typical adults do. Both
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adolescents and individuals with autism are considered to have a
less mature ‘self’ system which provides self-concept, self-under-
standing, self-other distinction and self-comparison than typical
adults [55,56]. Thus, it is possible that the reduced of social
priming of mimicry in these populations results from weakness of
the active-self. Future research need to verify this.
It is also interesting to consider the possible neural mechanism
for the social priming effects on mimicry. Past research suggests
that medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is an important brain region
for the social control of mimicry [3]. Social stimuli such as eye
gaze modulate mimicry by influencing the neural activity in mPFC
[57]. mPFC is also strongly involved in self-related tasks [58]. For
example, implicit self-other evaluation and comparison strongly
engage mPFC [59,60]. Moreover, mPFC has been linked to one’s
prosociality. Activity in mPFC was found to be correlated with
daily prosocial behavior [61] and more activities in mPFC
predicted more subsequent prosocial behavior [62]. Interestingly,
a recent neuroimaging study suggests that mPFC is also the neural
substrate for social priming effects on behavior. Bengtsson et al.,
[36] showed that mPFC is actively engaged when self-esteem
primes modulate one’s cognitive monitoring ability. Given the fact
that mPFC involves in all four processes of social priming, control
of mimicry, prosociality and self-relatedness, it appears likely that
processing of the prosociality and self-relatedness of a prime takes
place in mPFC and the neural activity of mPFC determines the
pro/antisocial priming effects on mimicry. Future research could
investigate this.
Limitations There are several limitations in the present studies that need
future research to further investigate. First of all, we only primed
the participant to be the victim, rather than the protagonist in the
first-person antisocial prime. It would be interesting to examine
how people mimic when they are primed to be the victims of an
antisocial event. Second, across three studies, pro/antisocial
primes always increased mimicry relative to non-social primes,
and did not ever decrease mimicry below that elicited by non-
social primes. It could be interesting to investigate what (if any)
social primes can make participants mimic less than non-social
situations. Recent studies suggest social group membership as a
strong modulator of mimicry where priming social in-groups
increases mimicry while priming social out-groups decreases
mimicry [63]. As we did not distinguish the ethnicity of our
participants in three studies, it will be interesting to see whether
Caucasian/African-originated participants have different mimicry
patterns or whether the hand stimuli when changed into a black
colored skin would elicit different mimicry responses.
Conclusions Overall, our series of three studies demonstrate that priming can
influence mimicry responses in controlled lab situations, but that
the direction of the effects obtained depends critically on the self-
relatedness of the primes. We suggest these results are compatible
with an active-self model of prime-to-behaviour effects, and that
further study of the role of the self in priming would be valuable.
Supporting Information
Text S1 Scrambled sentences in Experiment 1.
(DOC)
Text S2 Scrambled sentences in Experiment 2.
(DOC)
Author Contributions
Conceived and designed the experiments: YW AH. Performed the
experiments: YW. Analyzed the data: YW. Contributed reagents/
materials/analysis tools: YW AH. Wrote the paper: YW AH.
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Social Priming of Mimicry and Self-Relatedness
PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 11 April 2013 | Volume 8 | Issue 4 | e60249
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