Introduction

In this text we confront a puzzling incongruity: People seem capable of mimicking others' facial, vocal, and postural expressions with stunning rapidity and, consequently, are able to “feel themselves into” others' emotional lives to a surprising extent; however, they also seem oblivious to the importance of emotional contagion in social encounters, and unaware of how swiftly and completely they are able to track the expressions of others.

In one recent experiment, for example, Frank Bernieri and his students (Bernieri, Davis, Knee, & Rosenthal, personal communication) conducted a series of personal perception experiments. They compared how 45 judges thought they made decisions versus how they had actually made them. The judges viewed 50 one-minute clips of a social interaction between debating partners: It was their job to decide how much the partners liked one another. Afterward, the judges were asked what cues they had utilized in making their decisions. Those they thought most important in their decisions as to how much rapport debaters felt for one another are shown in Table 6.1. Judges assumed they had relied most heavily in their assessments on the targets' proximity, frequency of smiling, and expressiveness; they explicitly denied any influence of such factors as mutual silences, postural mirroring, or synchrony. When we look at the cues judges actually used, however (Table 6.2), we see that, without knowing it, they were greatly influenced by synchrony.