Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.
Department of General Psychology: Judgment, Decision Making, Action, Faculty of Psychology, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany.
Exp Psychol. 2023 Nov;70(6):355-365. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000605.
Research has shown that people automatically imitate others and that this tendency is stronger when the other person is a human compared with a nonhuman agent. However, a controversial question is whether automatic imitation is also modulated by whether people the other person is a human. Although early research supported this hypothesis, not all studies reached the same conclusion and a recent meta-analysis found that there is currently neither evidence in favor nor against an influence of animacy beliefs on automatic imitation. One of the most prominent studies supporting such an influence is the study by Liepelt and Brass (2010), who found that automatic imitation was stronger when participants believed an ambiguous, gloved hand to be human, as opposed to wooden. In this registered report, we provide a high-powered replication of this study ( = 199). In contrast to Liepelt and Brass (2010), we did not find an effect of animacy beliefs on automatic imitation. However, we did find a correlation between automatic imitation and perceived self-other similarity. Together, these results suggest that the gloved hand procedure does not reliably influence automatic imitation, but interindividual differences in perceived similarity do.
研究表明，人们会自动模仿他人，而且与非人类代理相比，当另一个人是人类时，这种倾向更强。然而，一个有争议的问题是，自动模仿是否也受到人们认为另一个人是否是人类的影响。尽管早期的研究支持这一假设，但并非所有研究都得出了相同的结论，最近的一项元分析发现，目前既没有证据支持也没有证据反对能动性信念对自动模仿的影响。支持这种影响的最著名的研究之一是 Liepelt 和 Brass（2010）的研究，他们发现当参与者认为一个模棱两可的、戴手套的手是人类时，而不是木制的，自动模仿会更强。在本注册报告中，我们对这项研究进行了高功效复制（n=199）。与 Liepelt 和 Brass（2010）不同，我们没有发现能动性信念对自动模仿的影响。然而，我们确实发现自动模仿和感知自我-他人相似性之间存在相关性。综上所述，这些结果表明，戴手套的手程序不能可靠地影响自动模仿，但个体间感知相似性的差异确实会产生影响。
