Mimicry for money: Behavioral consequences of imitation

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Abstract

Two experiments investigated the idea that mimicry leads to pro-social behavior. It was hypothesized that mimicking the verbal behavior of customers would increase the size of tips. In Experiment 1, a waitress either mimicked half her customers by literally repeating their order or did not mimic her customers. It was found that she received significantly larger tips when she mimicked her customers than when she did not. In Experiment 2, in addition to a mimicry- and non-mimicry condition, a baseline condition was included in which the average tip was assessed prior to the experiment. The results indicated that, compared to the baseline, mimicry leads to larger tips. These results demonstrate that mimicry can be advantageous for the imitator because it can make people more generous.

Section snippets

Method

Overview. A waitress in a restaurant verbally mimicked half of her customers and did not verbally mimic the other half. She did this by literally repeating the customer’s order in the mimicry condition and not repeating the order in the non-mimicry condition. Afterwards the size of the tip was assessed.

Participants and design. Sixty groups of customers, without their awareness, participated in this experiment, 30 groups in each condition. Each group was randomly assigned to either the mimicry

Method

Overview. Experiment 2 was similar to Experiment 1 with three important exceptions. First, a waitress was included who was unaware of the hypotheses. Second, the waitresses wrote down each order in addition to their verbal responses. While in the mimicry condition the waitresses literally repeated the orders, in the non-mimicry condition, the orders were not repeated, but the waitress made clear that she understood the order, for example by saying “okay!” or “coming up!” With the exception of

General discussion

The two studies presented here provide evidence that mimicry can be used to increase tip size. In two studies, a waitress received a larger tip when she mimicked her customers than when she did not. In Experiment 2, a naı̈ve waitress was added who replicated the findings from Experiment 1, thereby suggesting that experimenter effects are not able to account for the obtained results. In addition, the results from Experiment 2 suggest that mimicry increases the size of the tips in comparison to

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    We thank Kerry Kawakami for her very helpful comments and suggestions.

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