From today’s Reveries, Masterful Mimicry

Researchers are now saying what good sales people (and con artists) have known all along — that rapport between people “is highly dependent on mimicry,” reports Benedict Carey in The New York Times (2/12/08). In one recent experiment by Rick van Baaren of Nijmegen University, a “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.” A few minutes later, the researcher “dropped six pens on the floor, making it look like an accident.

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