It is said that mim­ic­k­ing a person’s body lan­guage helps to cre­ate false camaraderie–a man­u­fac­tur­ing of attrac­tion, if you will. Con­ven­tional wis­dom holds that this is because it helps you, the mim­ic­ker, empathise. This is false, recent research shows, but not far off; face and body motion mim­icry actu­ally “helps you to see them as they want to be seen, rather than as they really are”*.

In inter­ac­tions, tar­gets either lied or told the truth [about donat­ing to a char­ity], while observers mim­ic­ked or did not mimic the tar­gets’ facial and behav­ioral move­ments. Detec­tion of decep­tion was mea­sured directly by observers’ judg­ments of the extent to which they thought the tar­gets were telling the truth and indi­rectly by observers’ assess­ment of tar­gets’ emo­tions. The results demon­strated that non­mim­ick­ers were more accu­rate than mim­ic­k­ers in their esti­ma­tions of tar­gets’ truth­ful­ness and of tar­gets’ expe­ri­enced emo­tions. […] In the case of decep­tive mes­sages, mim­icry hin­ders emo­tional understanding.

As Han­son says, this man­u­fac­tured attrac­tion may exist because we are sig­nalling that we are not judg­ing and that we are accept­ing what is said at face value.

This talk of body lan­guage mim­icry reminded me of an arti­cle in Intel­li­gent Life pro­fil­ing Simon Lovell–the pro­lific con man/card shark who evi­dently uses the tech­nique quite extensively/purposefully in his cons.

“You have to fig­ure out someone’s wants and needs and con­vince them what you have will fill their emo­tional void.” A con man is essen­tially a salesman–a remark­ably good one–who excels at mak­ing peo­ple feel spe­cial and under­stood. A con man val­i­dates the victim’s desire to believe he has an edge on other people. […]

Mr Lovell draws peo­ple in by mir­ror­ing their body lan­guage. He breaks their defences by enter­ing their phys­i­cal space.

*The pub­lished arti­cle in ques­tion is behind a pay wall, hence the link to Over­com­ing Bias.