Social Cognition Center Cologne, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
PLoS One. 2018 Mar 28;13(3):e0193743. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0193743. eCollection 2018.
It is widely known that individuals frequently imitate each other in social situations and that such mimicry fulfills an important social role in the sense that it functions as a social glue. With reference to the anticipated action effect, it has recently been demonstrated that individuals do not only imitate others, but also engage in anticipated action before the observed person starts engaging in that action. Interestingly, both phenomena (i.e., mimicry and anticipated action) rely on tracking others' social behavior. Therefore, in the present research we investigated whether mimicry and anticipated action are related to social abilities as indicated by measures of social intelligence. The results demonstrate for the first time that mimicry as well as anticipated action is correlated with an important aspect of social intelligence-namely the ability to process social information. Theoretical implications and limitations are discussed.
众所周知，个体在社交情境中经常相互模仿，这种模仿在某种意义上起到了社会黏合剂的重要作用。参照预期的行为效果，最近有研究表明，个体不仅模仿他人，而且在被观察的人开始进行该行为之前，就已经预期到了该行为。有趣的是，这两种现象（即模仿和预期行为）都依赖于对他人社会行为的跟踪。因此，在本研究中，我们调查了模仿和预期行为是否与社会智能测量所表示的社会能力有关。结果首次表明，模仿和预期行为都与社会智能的一个重要方面——即处理社会信息的能力——相关。讨论了理论意义和局限性。
