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People often imitate some of the actions and gestures of others they are observing, without deliberately trying to do so. This tendency, known as automatic imitation, has long been assumed to be universal.

Researchers at Leuphana University Lüneburg, the University of Cologne, FernUniversität in Hagen and other institutions recently tried to determine whether automatic imitation is a universal feature of human behavior or varies across cultures. The findings of their study, published in Communications Psychology, suggest that this tendency to imitate is shared across the 22 countries studied, which vary in their levels of collectivism and individualism.

"We know that people tend to automatically imitate other people's actions, and this can help facilitate social interaction and foster social bonds," Oliver Genschow, first author of the paper, told Phys.org. "However, most previous research on automatic imitation has been conducted in Western countries, leaving open the question of whether this tendency is equally strong across different cultures. We wanted to address this gap."

Some countries are known to have a more collectivistic culture, while others lean more toward an individualistic one. Collectivistic cultures tend to emphasize group relationships and shared goals, while individualistic ones emphasize personal independence and individual goals.

Genschow and his colleagues set out to explore the possibility that this key difference between collectivistic and individualistic cultures influences automatic imitation. To do this, they conducted two studies involving participants from different countries.

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