Rutgers-Camden Graduate Student Researches the Art of Imitation
“When we’re fond of someone, we tend to mimic them more,” says Salinas Griffith, who is from Pemberton Township and now lives in Camden. “We unconsciously imitate one another to create a social bond and develop or maintain social relationships.”
Griffith is basing her research on prior studies of automatic imitation, which focuses on whether people automatically mimic others, even strangers, and if the mimicry increases one person’s fondness of another.
The Rutgers–Camden graduate student is taking the research a step further to determine if a person is more likely to imitate someone with a similar characteristic of their own, such as ethnicity.
“Automatic imitation is an unconscious process that may facilitate the creation and maintenance of social bond with people we meet or know,” Griffith says. “I’m looking at what social influences cause an individual to unconsciously imitate others. For example, factors such as personality types may have an influence on how receptive we are to imitation.”
Griffith, who received her bachelor’s degree from Rutgers–Camden and her associate’s degree from Burlington County College, now is enrolled in the master’s program in psychology at Rutgers–Camden, where she is conducting the research with the help of Sean Duffy, an associate professor of psychology.
“People unconsciously imitate other individuals with whom they are interacting,” Duffy says. “For example, in walking down the street, strangers tend to start walking in lock-step, or if I blink, you tend to blink as well.”
Griffith and Duffy say numerous studies have found that people tend to imitate gestures, mannerisms, speech patterns, and accents.
“We are from our first hours after birth master imitators,” Duffy says. “Our propensity to imitate one another may play an important role in how we understand ourselves and other people, and may be related to how the brain works at a very basic level of processing.”
Griffith says the research will lead to a better understanding of children’s learning processes and the function of the brain, which could lead to breakthroughs in developmental disorders or brain injuries.
“This research has many implications to everyday life and it teaches us that we as humans are truly social beings with very advanced brains to create such complex processes to facilitate our social needs,” Griffith says.
Media Contact: Ed Moorhouse
(856) 225-6759
E-mail: ejmoor@camden.rutgers.edu