When I was a kid, I used to spend hours listening to Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky on their Sunday night radio show Loveline. I listened so often that I began to use one of their well-known phrases—“good times”—in my daily conversations. Scientists have a name for this phenomenon: behavioral mimicry.
You’ve probably experienced this before: after spending enough time with another person, you might start to pick up on his or her behavior or speech habits. You might even start to develop your friend’s habits without realizing it. There is a large body of literature concerning this sort of phenomenon, and it regularly happens for everything from body postures to accents to drink patterns. For example, one study found that young adults were more likely to drink their drink directly after their same-sex drinking partners, than for the two individuals to drink at their own paces.
And the effect isn’t limited to real-life face-to-face activities. Another study found that the same you-drink-then-I-drink pattern held even when watching a movie! In other words, people were more likely to take a drink of their drinks in a theater after watching the actors on the screen enjoy a drink. At least I don’t feel so strange anymore, having picked up on Adam Carolla’s “good times”.
New research published today in the journal PLOS ONE indicates that the same sort of behavioral mimicry is responsible for social eating, at least among university-age women of normal weight. That’s right: the young women were more likely to adjust their eating according to the eating pace of their same-sex dining companion.
As with most experiments, these results raise a whole new set of questions. Still, the finding that behavioral mimicry may at least partly account for eating behavior is important, and has real effects on health. The researchers note that “as long as people don’t fully recognize such important influences on intake, it will be difficult to make healthy food choices and keep a healthy diet, especially when people are exposed to the eating behavior of others”.
小题1:The author takes his own example of using “good times” to _________.
A．express his love for radio shows
B．prove the popularity of the show
C．show the influence of the hosts’ words
D．introduce the topic of the passage小题2:The underlined word “mimicry” in Paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to _________.
A．copying
B．adjusting
C．recognition
D．observation小题3:Which of the following is NOT an example of behavioral mimicry?
A．A boy eats his popcorn after watching the actor eat.
B．A boy buys a Nike shirt when he finds his desk-mate has one.
C．A girl unconsciously sits straight just as others do.
D．A girl takes on the Yorkshire accent after a month’s stay.小题4:It can be inferred from the last paragraph that _________.
A．behavioral mimicry is beneficial to our health
B．behavioral mimicry decides our eating behavior
C．there are doubts on the research results
D．there are people always exposed to bad eating habits小题5:What is probably the author’s purpose of writing this passage?
A．To draw readers’ attention to popular radio shows.
B．To introduce behavioral mimicry and its influence.
C．To appeal to readers not to fall into others’ habits.
D．To advocate healthy food choices among readers.
