Gesturing, With or Without Intent 123
You will commonly see behavior similar to this with a nervous
speaker, who also presumes that everyone in the audience is judg-
ing him. In his mind, the barriers protect him from scrutiny: He
stands behind the podium with the microphone angled to cover a
portion of his face, and his hands lift the papers he’s reading to
further obscure him. If he’s wearing glasses, the audience might
see nothing but ears and hair the whole time he’s presenting.
Mirroring
Mirroring can be a learned behavior, but, typically, it is nothing
more than assimilation. Mirroring is a natural response to your culture;
that’s how we get to be homogeneous as a society. Mirroring the
super-typical is a natural response to social norming.
We commonly get rewards—pay raises, compliments, and
invitations to events—from other people in our culture when we
behave similar to them. And when we don’t become them, we are
punished. High-pressure social norming is the requirement to mirror
the behavior of others or face extremely unpleasant consequences.
That’s what happens in Stockholm syndrome. U.S. military basic
training relies on a modified version with the Stockholm syndrome.
The components are these: One man uses ritualistic rage to intimi-
date you, to control every moment of your life, and forces you to
become like him. The new guy is like an ape thrown into a cage
with 27 others who all know who the alpha is and what pleases
him. You are the 28th ape who must try to figure that out so that the
alpha doesn’t tear your testicles off. So, you start to mimic him.