From Mimicry to Trust: A Tinbergian Approach

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Many daily decisions are made through quick evaluations of another’s trustworthiness, especially when they involve strangers. Individuals rely on a partner’s tractable characteristics, including expressions of emotion. These are readily mimicked even down to the physiological level. I here propose to investigate which forms of mimicry are empathic and inform decisions of trust and distrust. The mimicry-empathy linkage has come under discussion with the publication of counter-examples in biology and failures of replication in psychology, making the question of what mimicry entails even more important. The key role emotional expressions play in our daily life positions this revived debate around mimicry at the forefront of emotion science. Scientific advancement in this field, however, demands a completely new theoretical and methodological approach. Therefore, I will place mimicry within the Tinbergian framework. Fundamentally, this means that I will incorporate biological and psychological approaches to the study of mimicry and during dyadic interactions, investigate different forms of mimicry simultaneously, e.g. facial mimicry, contagious blushing, pupil mimicry, and their 1) Function: what they are good for. Using economic games, I will study which mimicry forms are related to empathy and inform social decisions; 2) Mechanism: how they operate on the neurophysiological level; 3) Development: how mimicry develops over the lifespan and which mimicry forms are phylogenetically continuous and shared with the bonobo, our closest living relative and link to our last common ancestor. For the first time, humans and bonobos will be directly compared on the basis of their mimicry and trust. This comparison can revolutionize the way humans perceive themselves when it comes to prosocial behaviour.