Christina Burley & Emily Harris (2000)

The Chameleon Effect is the idea that a person will unconsciously mimic or adapt to the behaviors, mannerisms, and actions of the people, that the person is interacting with. The experiment was broken in to two parts. The first part of the experiment consisted of a walking exercise with one participant and two confederates, where confederates manipulated the walking pace to see if participants would mimic. The second part of the experiment, was a mock-job interview, where the participants’ behaviors were either mimicked or not mimicked by the interviewer. Through an interview evaluation, data was collected to see if the participants that were mimicked by the interviewer felt more comfortable or closer to the interviewer. Participants were told that the experiment was on interview pressure and asked to wear heart monitors as a cover story for the true nature of the experiment. Using a Chi Square analysis c 2 (1)= 4.46, p < 0.05, results showed that participants did mimic the walking pace set by the confederates. A one-way analysis of variance (ANNOVA) F(1,22)= 7.139, p < 0.05, comfort level did increase if the participant was mimicked, but mimicking had no effect on how close the participant felt with the interviewer.