Imitation and Culture--论文代写范文精选

  在这篇essay代写范文中，心理学描述了一个广泛的实验，提供了明显的证据，在日常社会生活中。在这些实验中,参与者提供更多机会,表面上与实验无关的交互。

Introduction
  Social psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis agrees with Kinsbourne that imitation has important affiliative functions and is the default social behavior for human beings. The results he presents indicate that imitative behavior in human social interactions may be much more common than is generally recognized. Dijksterhuis distinguishes two imitative pathways. First, he describes a ‘‘low road’’ to the imitation of specific observed behaviors, arguing that we are wired for such imitation by shared representations of our own acts and observed acts, such as those discussed in vol. 1, part I in connection with mirror neurons and ideomotor theory, and in vol. 2, part I in connection with innate self–other equivalences expressed in early imitation. However, his main focus here is on the less direct ‘‘high road’’ to the imitation of complex patterns of behavior. On the high road, imitation is mediated unconsciously by the activation of personality traits and social stereotypes, which lead observers automatically to assimilate their behavior to general patterns of observed behavior. Such imitation, he argues, acts as ‘‘social glue,’’ with many beneficial social consequences; in many (though importantly, not all) cases it leads people to coordinate actions, to interact more smoothly, and to like each other.

  Dijksterhuis describes an extensive series of experiments that provide striking evidence of heavy travel on the high road to imitation in everyday social life. In these experiments, normal adult participants are primed by exposure to stimuli associated with traits (such as hostility, rudeness, politeness) or with stereotypes (such as elderly persons, college professors, soccer hooligans). Hostility-primed participants deliver more intense ‘‘shocks’’ than control participants in subsequent, ostensibly unrelated experiments based on Milgram’s (1963) classic experiments. Rudeness-primed participants spontaneously behave more rudely, and politeness-primed participants more politely, than control participants in subsequent, ostensibly unrelated interactions with experimenters. 

  Youthful participants who are subliminally primed with words associated with the elderly, such as ‘‘gray,’’ ‘‘bingo,’’ or ‘‘sentimental,’’ subsequently walk more slowly, perform worse on memory tasks, and express more conservative attitudes than age-matched control participants. College professor-primed participants perform better and soccer hooligan-primed participants perform worse than control participants on a subsequent, ostensibly unrelated general knowledge quiz. Such priming results are very robust. They hold across a wide range of verbal and visual primes and induced behavior, and when the primes are presented subliminally as well as when participants are conscious of them.32 Either way, participants are unaware of any influence or correlation between the primes and their behavior.

  As Dijksterhuis explains, these results show imitation in a broader sense than we have been considering up to now; traits and stereotypes elicit general patterns of behavior and attitudes, and influence the ways in which behavior is carried out, rather than eliciting specific novel behaviors. These broad imitative influences have been referred to as the chameleon effect (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). They are rapid, automatic, and unconscious, and do not depend on any conscious goal of the participant, making imitation the default social behavior for normal human adults. Just thinking about or perceiving a certain kind of action automatically increases, in ways participants are not aware of, the likelihood of engaging in that general type of behavior oneself. Nevertheless, these influences are often inhibited, for example, by goals that make conflicting demands; elderlyprimed participants don’t walk more slowly if they have an independent need to hurry. These influences are also inhibited when participants are focused on themselves. Again, overt imitation is the tip of the iceberg of underlying covert imitation.

  Another leading researcher in this area, social psychologist John Bargh, has emphasized elsewhere how very hard it is for people to accept that these broad imitative tendencies apply to themselves, both because they are unconscious and automatic, so that people are not aware of them, and because such external influences threaten their conception of themselves as being in conscious control of their own behavior (Bargh, 1999). Participants are surprised by, and even tend to resist, the experimental findings. We might expect resistance to be especially strong where the high road to imitation would make antisocial behavior more likely, as in exposure to aggressive traits and stereotypes in violent entertainment, discussed by Eldridge, vol. 2, ch. 11 and Huesmann, vol. 2, ch. 12. Nevertheless, it seems plausible to suppose that the power of broad imitative influences on behavior is recognized and exploited by advertising campaigns that expose viewers to traits and stereotypes. 

  As Bargh suggests, recognizing that we are subject to such automatic and unconscious imitative influences may help us to gain control of them and to assimilate behavior patterns more selectively. In addition to being subject to automatic imitative influences, human beings often deliberately select a pattern of behavior to imitate because it is associated with certain traits and stereotypes, even if they do not actually partake of these traits or stereotypes. This can be benign; perhaps I can become virtuous, as Aristotle suggested, by behaving like a virtuous person. But like automatic imitation, deliberate selective imitation does not always operate benignly. For example, a group of cooperators may develop shared behaviors by means of which members identify one another as cooperators and exclude noncooperators from free riding. Noncooperators may then selectively imitate such behaviors in order to induce cooperative behavior from group members, and then fail to return cooperative behavior, thus deceptively obtaining the benefits of cooperation without paying the costs.

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