The Ultimate Body Language Book

one party wishes to submit. We concluded with a list of additional emotional body language.
Chapter 12 - Mirroring And Building Of Rapport
Introduction – Chapter 12
When people “jive,” they are in agreement and this commonality leads to liking.
Mirroring or “isopraxis” is as important to lifelong friends as to strangers meeting for the first time,
since mirroring is a way to test and maintain the level of rapport being established between two people
or groups of people. Mirroring as it applies to nonverbal communication describes body postures, body
positions and gestures that are held in unison or echoed a few seconds later, across people as they
interacting. When full mirroring appears it is as if each person is looking into the mirror and seeing
their reflection. When full mirroring happens, it indicates a high level or rapport, or connectivity
between people.
We mirror as a form of bonding with one another, and it happens without our conscious awareness. In
fact, mirroring is difficult to carry out in a natural way at a conscious level as we will see in this
chapter. The evolutionary origins of mirroring might stem from imitative learning, where gestures and
movements or skills are passed from one person to another. Children learn to imitate our facial
expressions and quickly graduate to imitating our body positions, and then later they imitate us as we
carry out tasks. If you’ve even driven with a youngster, you’ve watched them pretend to drive with
their arms up, rocking the wheel left and right, or working the stick shift. Imitation has been said to be
the greatest form of flattery and in mirroring this is the case.
In ancient times, mirroring would have created group cohesion and identity. Sports groups, riot officers,
firemen, and a myriad of occupations all wear the same uniform. It is this dress that formulates the
beginnings of the behaviour that eventually leads to a group’s ability to functioning in unison. Imagine
if policemen all showed up in different dress and tried to control a crowd. To the rioters, they would
seem as if they were rogue rioters themselves which would only exacerbate the problem. The rioters