Facial mimicry happens when we disagree, too

In face-to-face conversations, people often start to copy each other's facial expressions. When this happens, they also tend to report liking the other person more and finding the conversation more enjoyable, note the authors of a new paper in Emotion. As a result, it's been suggested that a positive social interaction is required for facial mimicry to take place.

Previous studies on this have tended to take place in the lab, however, and have focused on situations in which people are agreeing. Inbal Ravreby at the Weizmann Institute of Science and colleagues therefore set out to explore whether facial mimicry might also happen during disagreements, in the real world. They decided to focus on conversations about politics because, as they write, "this topic is common among interacting individuals and can quickly lead to agreement or disagreement."

The researchers collected together 150 video clips from political interviews conducted in the US. (These interviews were taken from news channels, and sourced from YouTube, for example.) One third were between a Republican interviewee and a Republican interviewer. Another third featured an interviewer and an interviewee who were both Democrats. In the rest, the interviewer and the interviewee had different political beliefs — so the interviewer was a Democrat while the interviewee was Republican, or vice versa. These videos were all judged by independent raters to feature either high levels of either agreement or disagreement between the two people.

The team then used specialised software to analyse the videos and identify the presence and intensity of six facial expressions — happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise — during the course of the clips.

The results showed that, overall, facial mimicry not only happened often, but it didn't just happen when people were agreeing. "In contrast to the prevalent notion that positive social interaction, such as agreement, fosters mimicry, we found mimicry of all facial expressions in both agreement and disagreement," they write. While mirroring a conversation partner is typically thought of as a way to bring people closer together, the team observed that facial mimicry was just as likely to occur when people were disagreeing. "

The six facial expressions weren't all mimicked equally, however. Surprise was less likely to be reciprocated than fear and sadness, and fear was less reciprocal than anger, the team notes. 

Further analysis also identified that the mimicry patterns observed between two agreeing Democrats and two agreeing Republicans weren't identical. This initial finding needs follow-up work to explore exactly what the differences are, but it suggests that facial mimicry patterns can be different even in similar contexts.

Whether facial expressions are always reliable indicators of our emotions, or rather flexible tools for social influence, is a matter of debate. And the team does note that the people featured in the videos were all aware that the interviews would be watched by others. It's possible that when someone wants to convince or impress an audience, mimicry might be a way to affect the reactions of the audience, they write. They would now like to see further research to explore whether their results hold in other social contexts — for example, during a less formal conversation between two peers.

If future work does supports their findings, it will firm up an alternative idea about the function of facial mimicry, the researchers add. Earlier work has found that when it happens, it does so quickly — often within a second of perceiving the other person's facial expression. If we do tend to rapidly, automatically mimic a wide range of facial expressions, whether we're agreeing with someone or not, this would support the idea that facial mimicry is in fact a tool to help us to understand how the other person is feeling.

Read the paper in full:

Ravreby, I., Navon, M., Pinhas, E., Lerer, J., Bar-Anan, Y., & Yeshurun, Y. (2025). The many faces of mimicry depend on the social context. Emotion, 25(4), 802–814. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001445

Want the latest in psychological research, straight to your inbox?
Sign up to Research Digest's free weekly newsletter.