Imitation and perspective taking are core features of non-verbal social
interactions. We imitate one another to signal a desire to affiliate and
consider other’s points of view so as to better understand their
position. Research from social psychology suggests that there exists a
bi-directional relationship between imitation and prosocial behaviour. A
handful of cognitive studies have supported these findings by showing
that priming prosocial behaviours increases imitative tendencies in a
subsequent reaction time task. The relationships perspective taking has
with imitation and prosociality have, however, received less attention.
Using a visuo-motor automatic imitation task as a measure of imitation,
the current study replicated prosocial priming designs and extended
them to include a measure of visual perspective taking. Contrary to
previous studies, we found no effect of prosocial priming on
imitation. Further, we were unable to investigate the effects of priming
on visual perspective taking, as a ceiling effect on accuracy was
ubiquitous across all experimental groups. To better understand our
unexpected results, we performed a meta-analysis for the effects of
prosocial priming on imitation and calculated a weighted average
accuracy for published scores on the visual perspective taking task. The
result indicates that if a relationship does exist between prosocial
priming and automatic imitation, it is likely small and variable. Findings
from the visual perspective taking task lead us to conclude that it is not
a robust or reliable measure for assessing perspective taking abilities in
typical adults. Further work is required to determine whether
perspective taking skills can be modulated using priming techniques.
When contemplating the effects of experimental manipulations on
behaviour, our work demonstrates the utility of replication and metaanalyses.