If you want to get better at persuasion, maybe you should practice imitating other people.
Anything that increases the common ground and reduces the distance between you and the other person is a good thing. And the quickest way to accomplish this it so synchronize as many of the other person's aspects as you can -- adopt the same attitude, make the same motions and speak the same way.
There's some good jury learning in self-help books. That quote is from Nicholas Boothman's How To Make People Like You In 90 Seconds Or Less, and before you unsubscribe to a blogger who would own such a thing, read Benedict Carey's article "You Remind Me Of Me," in the science section of tomorrow's New York Times. It turns out that research supports this idea:
Psychologists have been studying the art of persuasion for nearly a century, analyzing activities like political propaganda, television campaigns and door-to-door sales. . . . They have found that immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people.
Toe-tapping their way to higher sales
Mothers unconsciously imitate babies, friends unconsciously imitate friends -- but conscious imitation is powerful too. Carey describes a number of studies, including this one by Duke researchers Robin Tanner and Tanya Chartrand:
The team had 37 Duke students try out what was described as a new sports drink, Vigor, and answer a few questions about it. The interviewer mimicked about half the participants using a technique Dr. Chartrand had developed in earlier studies.
The technique involved mirroring a person’s posture and movements, with a one- to two-second delay. If he crosses his legs, then wait two seconds and do the same, with opposite legs. If she touches her face, wait a beat or two and do that. If he drums his fingers or taps a toe, wait again and do something similar. . . .
None of the copied participants picked up on the mimicry. But by the end of the short interview, they were significantly more likely than the others to consume the new drink, to say they would buy it and to predict its success in the market.
"A delicate balance"
But wait, you say. I won't do it right, and I'll get caught. It's true; you might, especially if you jump on the other person's gestures too quickly. The article continues:
Dr. [Jeremy] Bailenson, the Stanford psychologist, has been testing the effects of different forms of mimicry by programming a computer-generated figure, an avatar, to mirror the movements and gestures of people in a study.
He has found that his subjects pick up the mimicry when it is immediate and precise. If the avatar is slightly out of sync, however — waits four seconds, for instance — then the mimicking goes unnoticed, and the usual rules apply. The virtual creating comes across as warm and convincing, as if controlled by another human.
“The point is it’s a delicate balance to get it right, and I suspect that people who are good at this know how to do it intuitively,” Dr. Bailenson said.
Too much to remember
It's all fascinating, but does it mean you should add mimicry to your list of trial skills? Probably not, unless you're already a natural at it. Most obviously, whether conscious or unconscious, it's a way that one person relates to another. It wouldn't make sense to mirror six or twelve people. And there's far too much else to remember in trial.
A more modest, goal, though, is worth striving for. Two or three times during your next trial, or next anything, try to notice a gesture or posture that you could mirror. You'll probably be surprised at how difficult this is. The thing that keeps us from doing it is the same thing that keeps us from connecting better with jurors: we're too wrapped up in ourselves. You'll be planning your next sentence, or thinking about your last meeting, and suddenly you'll realize that for the last several minutes you've hardly known whether the other person's eyes are open.
Anything that makes you notice will make you better -- and this is fun. Try it.
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Note: What a relief. For years I thought I'd never remember the punch line that responds to the old line "Walk this way." Riddle solved; there are more than a dozen, used over decades, and they're catalogued in Wikipedia from "After The Thin Man" to "M*A*S*H" to "Rugrats."
(Image by Jim Crossley at http://www.flickr.com/photos/raindog/10550156/; license details there.)
