Department of Consumer and Economic Psychology, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2013 Aug;142(3):763-73. doi: 10.1037/a0029795. Epub 2012 Sep 3.
Recent studies have shown that individuals often imitate the behavior of others. In these studies, the observed and imitated behaviors were always identical. The present research goes one step further and disentangles the imitation of movements from their behavioral contexts. On the basis of theories that the perception of behavior refers to the same mental representations as the execution, we found that imitation is not confined to the same class of behaviors but rather to the same class of movements that may be involved in different behaviors. Four studies demonstrated that watching an athlete lifting a barbell leads to an increase in participants' drink intake when drinking involved a similar movement (lifting a cup) but not when drinking did not involve a lifting movement (drinking through a tube). The effects were stronger for individuals high in perspective taking (Study 1) and for situations in which the perspective was manipulated to be similar to the observed actor's (Study 2). These findings demonstrate the power of movements in imitation processes, suggesting that shared goal representation is not necessary for imitating others' movements.
最近的研究表明，个体经常模仿他人的行为。在这些研究中，被观察到和被模仿的行为总是完全相同的。本研究更进一步，将动作的模仿与其行为背景分离开来。基于行为的感知指的是与执行相同的心理表征的理论，我们发现，模仿不仅限于同一类行为，而是同一类运动，这些运动可能涉及不同的行为。四项研究表明，当饮酒涉及类似的动作（举起杯子）时，观看运动员举重杠铃会导致参与者增加饮料摄入量，但当饮酒不涉及举重动作（通过吸管饮用）时，则不会。对于高视角的个体（研究 1）和在视角被操纵为类似于观察到的演员的情况下（研究 2），这些影响更强。这些发现表明了运动在模仿过程中的强大作用，这表明模仿他人的运动并不需要共享目标表示。
