When someone across from you lifts a finger, your own hand may be pulled toward copying them before you decide anything. The surprising question is whether that hidden pull changes with culture. People tend to automatically imitate each other.

This imitative behavior serves an important social function by creating feelings of affiliation and mutual understanding. Imitation facilitates social interactions and increases liking for each other. Automatic imitation is often assumed to be universal.

But most research on imitation has been conducted in Western, educated, wealthy democracies, leaving open whether people from different cultures imitate others in the same way. The question is whether cultural differences exist in the processes behind automatic imitation.

To investigate it, the study compared people across twenty-two nations that differed in collectivism and individualism. The study tested the idea in two experiments. One compared automatic imitation in two nations that differed in collectivism and individualism.

The other examined automatic imitation across twenty-two nations while controlling for whether the observed movement lined up spatially with the required response. The first experiment found no difference in automatic imitation between people from the United States and people from Vietnam.

This suggested that people from individualistic and collectivistic cultures imitate to a similar degree. But two weaknesses in that research design made this conclusion less certain. The study found strong evidence for the same imitation effect across all nations when the observed movement and the required response lined up spatially.

In most nations, the effect also appeared when they did not line up. Overall, the basic automatic imitation effect was consistently replicated in all the nations studied. People from more collectivistic cultures did not differ from people from more individualistic cultures in how strongly they imitated in general.

The strongest evidence supported the imitation effect, with no compelling evidence that culture changed it. People generally had a tendency to imitate other people’s actions automatically. Earlier research had mainly studied Western, educated, wealthy democracies, so this question had remained open.

Across twenty-two nations, the investigation found no conclusive evidence that culture affected automatic imitation. The findings point to automatic imitation as a global, robust phenomenon with little room for strong changes caused by culture. Across the nations studied, people showed the same basic tendency to copy another person’s action, with no compelling evidence that culture made the effect stronger or weaker.

That suggests this small social reflex may be widely shared.