Us and Them: Anticipated Imitation Between Groups

People’s propensity to imitate others’ actions is well documented. However, research on imitation remains mainly focused on dyadic social interactions, disregarding that we often interact with others as parts of larger groups. Extending sparse research on imitation beyond dyadic interactions, the current study investigated how anticipated imitation effects become modulated in social interactions between groups. Participants performed an anticipated imitation task in a virtual environment depicting four animated hands that were controlled by the participant, a virtual co-actor, and two virtual agents of an opposing dyad, respectively. Participants responded to symbolic stimuli by lifting their index or middle finger and performed the task either alone or together with their co-actor, while either one or both agent(s) of the opposing dyad imitated their responses. We found that participants’ task accuracy was affected by group-level congruency relations between the two dyads: Acting together with another co-actor was facilitated when both vs. one agent(s) of the opposing dyad imitated participants’ responses, while the opposite trend emerged when participants performed the task without their co-actor. A descriptively similar performance pattern in participants' response time data did not reach statistical significance. Explorative analysis showed that this performance pattern was moderated by participants’ general response speed and was obscured by participants who responded relatively fast on the task. Our findings indicate that anticipated responses of multiple interaction partners can play a causal role in controlling one’s own contributions to a social interaction and provide novel evidence that joint task representations encode actions on a group level.