278 Understanding Intuitive Decision Making
Audiences selectively attend to one speaker versus another depending on their current goal. Forexample, if two people are talking and one is a subordinate and the other a prospective client, the
audience will attend to the person who is more important to them at the moment.^247 Audiences
also selectively attend to those with power over them,^248 especially to leaders.^249 In addition, they
will tend to ignore those who cannot help them achieve their goals.^250
When attending to others during social interactions, audience members spontaneously imitatetheir nonverbal behaviors.^251 In conversation, people appear to imitate each other’s accents, vocal
tone, and vocal speed.^252 Audiences also spontaneously mimic others’ postures, gestures, and man-
nerisms.^253 During social interactions, spontaneous imitation is actually the default behavior. Not
engaging in imitation requires additional mental processing and tends to cause the audience stress.
Interestingly, a conversational partner who is “anti-mimicked” during a social interaction will show
signs of ego-depletion relative to one who is mimicked.^254
Brain Regions Activated. Neuroscientists fi nd that spontaneous imitation of another’s nonver-bal behaviors is associated with activation of the brain’s mirror system, which is located in areas of
the frontal and parietal lobes of both hemispheres (see Figure 3.4 , p. 108).^255
Unusual verbal and typographic behaviors can attract attention, too. The following email pres-ents a CEO’s quarterly report to his employees and one of his employee’s think-aloud comments
about it (note: the dates, fi rm’s products, product names, and the employee’s name have been
changed). The CEO’s use of all capital letters, block text, unusual words, unusual spacing and
punctuation, and awkward phrasing stood out to the employee. These errors and unusual practices
caught the employee’s attention more than the report’s verbal content about the fi rm’s progress that
quarter. Although the fi rm might have been on the right track fi nancially, the CEO’s verbal behav-
iors led the employee to infer that the fi rm’s top management may be incompetent.