Imitation in the eyes of others: Agency and communion in observed mimicry

People automatically imitate each other, which is known to elicit feelings of affiliation. Previous research on mimicry has mainly studied dyadic interactions and thereby neglected that many social interactions are often observed by others. This raises the question of how observers perceive individuals who mimic or are mimicked. Based on previous research, we formulated two competing hypotheses about how third-party observers perceive people who initiate actions and people who mimic the actions along the Big Two dimensions (i.e., agency vs. communion). We tested these hypotheses against each other in eight experiments. The results strongly support the "Agency Hypothesis" according to which people who initiate actions are perceived as more agentic than people who mimic the actions. Our experiments also find some support for the "Communion Hypothesis" indicating that people who mimic actions are perceived as more communal than people who initiate the actions. Interestingly, support for the Agency Hypothesis was very robust, whereas the effect on perceived communion was more variable and dependent on the stimuli used. When investigating downstream consequences of the link between observed mimicry and ascriptions along the Big Two dimensions, we find that both ascribed agency and communion predict donation behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).