Do Individual and Joint Action Goals Modulate Imitative Response Tendencies?

Coordinated social interaction requires people to control their tendencies to imitate each other’s actions. Previous research suggests that imitative response tendencies become modulated by the goals to which one’s own and others’ actions are individually or jointly directed. However, an open question is how different levels of goal representation (ranging from higher-level goals that specify joint or individual action outcomes to lower-level goals encoding own and others’ movement features) interact and shape imitative congruency effects during social interactions. In two experiments we manipulated imitative congruency between individual action goals and lower-level movement goals of two co-actors that either worked towards individual or joint task goals. Overall, participants’ task performance was driven by imitative congruency between co-actors’ individual action goals which modulated effects of imitative congruency between co-actors’ low-level movement goals. These imitation effects were found to be present regardless of instructing participants to work towards individual or joint task goals. We discuss how these findings support goal-directed theories of imitation and why co-actors’ individual action goals rather than their joint task goals seem to dominate the control of imitative response tendencies in social interactions.