Across 22 Nations, the Urge to Copy Your Neighbour Proves Remarkably Universal

When someone near you lifts a finger, your own fingers are already half-moved. This reflex-like tendency, known as automatic imitation, has long been assumed to be a universal feature of the human mind, yet almost everything scientists knew about it came from a narrow slice of humanity: young, educated, Western participants tested in university laboratories. A new large-scale study published in Communications Psychology set out to answer a deceptively simple question: do people from collectivistic cultures, who tend to define themselves through others, automatically imitate more strongly than people from individualistic cultures, who define themselves through the self? The answer, based on thousands of participants across 22 nations, appears to be no. The basic drive to copy what we see seems to operate with striking uniformity around the globe, and culture, at least as measured along the collectivism-individualism dimension, leaves surprisingly little fingerprint on it.

The research team, led by Oliver Genschow of Leuphana University Lüneburg and the University of Cologne, built their investigation on two theoretical pillars. The first is ideomotor theory, which holds that actions are represented in the brain as images of the sensory feedback they produce. Because we repeatedly watch others perform movements we ourselves perform, the perception of another person’s action and the execution of our own action come to rely on shared motor representations, creating a kind of motoric self-other overlap. Decades of evidence from behavioural experiments, functional MRI, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and even single-cell recordings in monkeys and humans support the idea that observing and executing an action draw on common neural machinery. The second pillar, the theory of objective self-awareness, proposes that when attention is directed toward the self, the influence of perception on behaviour changes, because self-focus favours actions aligned with the self rather than those linked to others.

These two theories combine into a clear cultural prediction. Culture profoundly shapes self-construal, particularly along the collectivism-individualism dimension, one of the most established frameworks in cross-cultural psychology. Collectivism is associated with an interdependent self-concept: people in more collectivistic societies, concentrated in East Asia, Africa, and Latin America, tend to focus more strongly on the needs, goals, and interests of the group. Individualism, predominant in Western countries such as the United States and much of Central Europe, is characterised by an independent self-concept and a stronger focus on one’s own needs and goals. If focusing on others boosts automatic imitation while focusing on the self dampens it, then people from collectivistic nations should imitate automatically more than people from individualistic nations. Earlier studies had hinted at cultural variation in imitation, but most relied on small samples, compared only two countries, or used poorly controlled tasks, leaving the question genuinely open.

To measure automatic imitation, the researchers used the imitation-inhibition task, the classic instrument in this field. Participants see a number cue, either 1 or 2, on a computer screen and must lift either their index or middle finger accordingly. Simultaneously, they watch a picture of another person’s hand lifting either the same finger, a congruent trial, or the other finger, an incongruent trial. When the instructed action differs from the observed one, the automatic tendency to imitate interferes with performance and slows responses; when the actions match, imitation works with the instruction and speeds them up. The difference in reaction times between congruent and incongruent trials is the congruency effect, the standard index of automatic imitation. Crucially, the task contains two separable components: imitative compatibility, the facilitation that arises from matching the same effector movement, and spatial compatibility, the facilitation that arises when the observed movement aligns with the executed one in space. Previous work shows automatic imitation is driven mainly by imitative compatibility, but spatial information contributes too, and disentangling the two matters enormously for cross-cultural comparisons.

The team ran two preregistered experiments. Experiment 1 compared Vietnam, a strongly collectivistic nation, with the United States, a strongly individualistic one, using population-representative online samples recruited by age and gender through the panel provider Toluna. After preregistered exclusions, 408 participants aged 21 to 65 completed a validated online version of the imitation-inhibition task, in which the model’s gloved left hand was rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise to reduce spatial confounds. The results replicated the basic effect decisively: participants responded faster in congruent trials, around 552 milliseconds, than in incongruent trials, around 578 milliseconds, a large and highly significant congruency effect. Vietnamese participants were overall faster than American participants, but the critical interaction between congruency and nation was absent, both in conventional significance testing and in Bayesian analyses, which favoured the null hypothesis. People in a collectivistic society and people in an individualistic society showed essentially the same automatic tendency to copy.

Experiment 2 addressed the two weaknesses of the first study: only two nations had been tested, and the stimulus setup may not have fully eliminated spatial compatibility, which could have masked a genuine cultural difference. This time the researchers recruited 5,573 participants across 22 nations selected with the revised Minkov-Hofstede model of culture, spanning the full range from highly individualistic to highly collectivistic while keeping other cultural dimensions, such as power distance and uncertainty avoidance, as similar as possible. Instructions were professionally translated into each national language. After preregistered exclusions, 4,447 participants remained, and the task was redesigned following a method introduced by Catmur and Heyes: half the trials showed the model’s hand from a frontal view and half showed a vertically mirrored version, allowing spatial compatibility to be manipulated experimentally within participants in a two-by-two design crossing spatial and imitative compatibility.

The findings were unambiguous on the main question. Both spatial compatibility and imitative compatibility produced robust effects, and imitative congruency effects emerged in every one of the 22 nations, with confidence intervals excluding zero in spatially compatible trials for all countries and in most countries even for spatially incompatible trials. Monte Carlo simulations confirmed the study had more than 99.9 percent power to detect even a 2.5-millisecond difference in the key compatibility effects. When national collectivism scores were added to the statistical models, neither the interaction between imitative compatibility and collectivism nor the interaction between spatial compatibility and collectivism reached significance. In other words, the strength of automatic imitation did not track how collectivistic or individualistic a nation was. The authors are careful to note that Bayesian analyses did not provide overwhelming evidence for the null effect, so a modest cultural modulation remains theoretically possible, but with such a large and diverse sample, a strong modulation by culture now seems unlikely.

There was one intriguing, though preliminary, exception. A three-way interaction between spatial compatibility, imitative compatibility, and collectivism reached conventional significance: in highly individualistic cultures, spatial alignment facilitated the imitative congruency effect, whereas in highly collectivistic cultures this facilitation was absent. One interpretation is that imitation in individualistic nations is more strongly influenced by irrelevant external, non-social information, namely spatial position, while imitation in collectivistic nations is more robust against such non-social influences, perhaps reflecting a deeper attentional link to the social partner rather than to surrounding space. Alternative explanations involve higher-level congruency processing and interference control, and the authors urge caution, since the Bayesian evidence for the three-way interaction was inconclusive and the effect was interpreted post hoc. Perspective-taking differences are considered unlikely, as meta-analytic evidence shows perspective-taking does not relate to automatic imitation. This pattern awaits direct replication before it can anchor any strong theoretical claim.

The broader implications reach into one of psychology’s liveliest debates: whether automatic imitation is modulated by social variables at all. Some factors, such as whether the observed agent is a human or a robot, reliably modulate the effect, while others, such as group membership, have failed to show consistent patterns. This study adds culture to the list of variables that appear not to strongly shape the phenomenon, suggesting that top-down social modulation of automatic imitation is less powerful than once assumed, and limiting theories that place self-other focus at the heart of imitative behaviour. The authors acknowledge limitations, including the substantial number of excluded participants, which matched rates in other online studies of the same task, and the fact that self-other focus was not measured directly. Still, the conclusion is striking: the automatic pull to mirror the actions of others, the invisible glue that smooths every social interaction, appears to be a global, robust feature of human cognition, shared from Bogotá to Hanoi to New York, with culture offering far less leverage over it than theory predicted.

Subject of Research: Cross-cultural variation in automatic imitation measured with the imitation-inhibition task

Article Title: Little evidence for cultural differences in automatic imitation

Article References: Little evidence for cultural differences in automatic imitation. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00517-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44271-026-00517-5

Keywords: automatic imitation, cross-cultural psychology, collectivism, individualism, imitation-inhibition task, ideomotor theory, self-other focus, WEIRD samples, social cognition, motor resonance, spatial compatibility, Communications Psychology