eatvancouver.net

Monkey See, Monkey Tips his Waiter
a Science Feature

By Jason Chin
Eat Vancouver Writer

Tuesday April 10th, 2007

Have you ever been hanging out with your buddies, watching the game, and suddenly realize that you are all sitting with basically the same posture? Or have you perhaps caught yourself fighting the urge to scratch your nose just after watching a friend do the same? Don’t worry, there’s nothing unusual about it – actually it’s a phenomenon psychologists have been documenting for years. And believe it or not, this research has recently been used to explain why some servers get bigger tips than others.

Behavioral mimicry is the term for the often automatic tendency to imitate the actions of others. In other words, it’s like when little brothers repeat back the exact words of their older brothers, except the type of mimicry psychologists are interested in is much more subtle and often slips beneath the radar of both the imitator and the imitated. The types of behavior studied run the gamut from tone of speech, cadence, accents, facial expressions, and even emotion. In one such study, participants interacted with another person whom they thought was another participant, but was actually a researcher trained to act out a behavior, such as shaking her foot. Sure enough, participants were more likely than control participants to begin mimicking this foot shake. Recent research has found that this type of laboratory research also applies in the restaurant world.

Rick van Baaren and colleagues at the University of Nijmegen in The Netherlands recently ran a series of studies in restaurants, in which waitresses were trained to recite orders back to customers, or in essence, mimic them. Now I’m sure we’ve all heard this at restaurant before without really paying attention to exactly what was going on. Van Baaren and colleagues took this a step further and compared the tips of this waitress when she used the mimicry techniques to times when she simply acknowledged the order. Remarkably, they found that her tips were 68% greater when she mimicked. A second study controlled for the notion that perhaps she simply seemed more conscientious in getting the order right by having her also write down orders. The mimicry condition held up as the best at grabbing tips.

So, why is it that mimicry leads to better tips? So far researchers have postulated that mimicry my have adaptive value, as it appears in several animal species and may play a role in teaching and learning. Further, mimicry may enhance empathy as it promotes a feeling of similarly amongst individuals.

So, if you are dining at a restaurant and happen to wonder why your server just repeated your order back to you (even though he or she wrote it down verbatim), maybe he or she is vying for a bigger tip. Or maybe it’s just a nice gesture. And if you’re a server yourself, I’d definitely take advantage of this social psychological principle in action.