Social Isolation Affects the Mimicry Response in the Use of Smartphones: An Ethological Experiment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Humans are social animals that rely on different ways to interact with each other. The COVID-19 pandemic strongly changed our communication strategies. Because of the importance of direct contact for our species, we predict that immediately after the forced social isolation, people were more prone to engage in direct rather than in virtual interactions, thus showing a lower mimicry response in the use of smartphones. In a non-longitudinal study, we collected behavioral data under naturalistic contexts and directly compared the data of the mimicry response gathered immediately following the Italian lockdown (May–September 2020) with those gathered one year later (May–October 2021). Contrary to our expectations, the mimicry response in the use of smartphones was higher immediately after the lockdown than a year later. Probably the large use of these devices during the lockdown translated into a greater sensitivity to be affected by others’ smartphone manipulation. Indeed, social isolation modified, at least in the short term, the ways we interact with others by making us more prone to engage in “virtual” social interactions. The bright side of the coin unveiled by our findings is that the effect seems to diminish over time. The large behavioral dataset analyzed here (1,608 events; 248 people) also revealed that the mimicry response in the use of smartphones was higher between familiar subjects than between strangers. In this view, mimicry in manipulating smartphones can be considered an example of joint action that fosters behavioral synchrony between individuals that, in the long-term, can translate into the formation of social bonding.