Seven Red

OK. I know this isn’t really what Burke means by identification, but I could think of no more sizzling a headline than one that suggest scientists have confirmed, through rigorous experimentation, a theory of persuasion Kenneth Burke put forth more than half a century ago. Can you feel your skin tingling?

An article in yesterday’s Science Times, aptly titled You Remind Me of Me, describes a series of studies that sought to test the persuasive effects of mimicry. We learn that, for example “[p]sychologists have been studying the art of persuasion for nearly a century.” Well, I’m glad someone’s on that project for nearly a century. I hear other people have been at it for 2,400 years, but I guess they don’t rate for the Science Times! In any case, the major upshot is that our diligent psychologists have “found that immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people.” Wow. Who knew?

More interesting is that such imitation effects are produced through distinctly physical sorts of mimicry:

In a recent experiment, Rick van Baaren, a psychologist at Nijmegen University in the Netherlands, had student participants go to a lab and give their opinions about a series of advertisements. A member of his research team mimicked half the participants while they spoke, roughly mirroring the posture and the position of their arms and legs, taking care not to be too obvious.

Minutes later, the experimenter dropped six pens on the floor, making it look like an accident.

In several versions of this simple sequence, participants who had been mimicked were two to three times as likely to pick up the pens as those who had not.

And this:

The technique involved mirroring a person’s posture and movements, with a one- to two-second delay. If he crosses his legs, then wait two seconds and do the same, with opposite legs. If she touches her face, wait a beat or two and do that. If he drums his fingers or taps a toe, wait again and do something similar.

All this has, of course, been well-known to people who study the language of persuasion for quite some time, but I think we are only recently getting to the physical processes that work in language itself. As the article notes, “Rhythm counts.” One, two, three, four. A University of Chicago neuroscientist puts it this way: “When you’re being mimicked in a good way, it communicates a kind of pleasure, a social high you’re getting from the other person, and I suspect it activates the areas of the brain involved in sensing reward.” I remain suspicious of these quick evolutionary explanations involving the “regions of the brain” and especially “sensing reward,” which strikes me as the continued bizarre insertion of exchange logics into brain function. They can’t help but locate the social within the individual, but I think the focus on pleasure is probably close. The point would be to think pleasure neither in a reward structure nor as an individual effect, but as a social phenomenon. Your pleasure center isn’t in your brain, but in your brain’s connectivity to other brains and things: the brain-Twinkie complex, which of course includes the sugar refinery and capitalism. Yum yum. We’re not close to that yet in psychology (except, perhaps, in works like those of Merlin Donald), but it’s also why rhetoricians don’t rate for the Science Times.

As with any discussion of persuasion, the Times reverts back to the that bad old fear of being touched, closing the article with standard disclaimers about all that bad bad bad manipulative persuasion. Scary. We learn that the force of mimicry can be misused, and that “[e]veryone has the right to be charmed but not seduced.” So, in a sense, we end where we really began:

“Stop copying me!”

“Stop copying me.”

“Stop it!”

Stop it…

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