You are watching the lesson and you begin to notice things. Familiar things. Things you do. Things you do that now this teacher is doing.

The way she moves her arm when a student gets a question right - a karate chop to the air. The way she challenges a student’s behaviour - a deft flick of the eyebrow. Even the way she says “allegory” with the emphasis on “gory”.

You said you would help her with her teaching strategies - all of which are on display - but you hadn’t thought she would completely take your style, too.

Should you be pleased? Freaked out? Maybe even offended?

Well, you shouldn’t be surprised. And you should be honest: you’ve probably done similar to someone else, too.

For it is human nature to mimic. Sometimes, this is conscious, intentional mimicry. But often, as with the example above, it’s subconscious: it just happens.

This “unintentional mirroring” is sometimes referred to as “the chameleon effect”, and research on the topic suggests that where people have a strong, positive relationship with someone else, they begin to mimic each other’s mannerisms - including hand gestures, voice intonation and even posture. It’s the reason why children often come home sounding - and acting - like their teachers at school.

The term “chameleon effect” was coined by Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh, who conducted a series of experiments on the phenomenon in the late 1990s while based at New York University.

“Teachers [will] absolutely pick up the mannerisms, quirks, gestures of other teachers non-consciously,” says Chartrand, who is now a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University in North Carolina. For new teachers, Chartrand explains, this can be even more pronounced as they will consciously mimic the habits of successful teachers, as well as subconsciously absorbing them.

But why does subconscious mimicry happen?

Bargh, now the James Rowland Angell professor of psychology at Yale University, says that there is both behavioural and neuroscience research on this topic. He explains that one theory is that “mirror neuron effects” are behind it: essentially, our brain recognises certain behaviours so we can categorise them - kindness, honesty, selfishness - and this also “activates areas in the motor system that prepare us to do the same thing”.

“The nice benefit of this natural mimicry is a tendency towards greater liking and bonding between the two people, all happening quite naturally,” he explains.

In his research with Chartrand, experiments invited participants to have a chat with someone who was conducting the research. On some occasions, those involved in the research would mimic the volunteers’ behaviour - crossing their legs or touching their face, for example - and in other cases they would not. They then gauged how much the participants “liked” the person they were talking with. They liked them more when they had been imitated, and reported a higher quality of interaction, too.

It is often assumed that subconscious replication happens over a long period of time. A young teacher would be mentored by an older teacher and eventually the younger would learn the habits naturally. But that theory is not entirely accurate. Trevor Foulk, an assistant professor in the department of Management and Organisation at the University of Maryland, conducted research in 2015 that found behaviours can be mimicked over very short periods of time.

“One of the implications of that paper is that behavioural contagion doesn’t have to take a long time,” Foulk says. “We would typically assume ... that teachers learn the styles of others over longish periods of observation, and if you asked someone, ‘Why did you do it that way?’, they’d be able to say, ‘Because I learned it from so and so.’

“While this is definitely one path to contagion, [our paper suggests] that it’s not the only path. Contagion can also happen very, very quickly - even after just one encounter with someone.”

So, while you may well have adopted the intonation of your mentor, it might be that you have also picked up the habit of throwing your hand out to the side when exasperated, which you only encountered that morning in a conversation with a therapist at child and adolescent mental health services that you had never met before. “I think it’s very likely that teachers pick up little tools and tactics via both processes - learning from people they consider mentors, but also via much more basic subconscious behavioural contagion mechanisms,” says Foulk.

Unfortunately, that contagion can be a negative force as well as a positive one, he explains. Foulk says that “just like the common cold, common negative behaviours can spread easily and have significant consequences for people in organisations”.

“Low-intensity negative behaviours like rudeness can be contagious, and ... this contagion effect can occur based on single episodes [and] anybody can be a carrier,” the paper says.

You may like to think that you are immune to this, that the rudeness of a superior does not rub off on you. You may think you consciously become less rude to others in order to compensate. Unfortunately, that may not be the case.

Amir Erez was a co-author on the Foulk paper, and is now W A McGriff III professor of management at the University of Florida. A recent study he worked on found that, in primary school settings, “when principals are rude, teachers are more rude, and the students become more violent”.

The study was led by Binyamin Cooper, a postdoc in the Tepper School of Business department of Organisational Behaviour and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University.

“One of the core tenets within the rudeness literature is the notion of ‘spirals of incivility’- a fundamental idea that rudeness begets rudeness in various forms,” Cooper says. “One such example is of a store manager behaving rudely to their employees, which, in turn, affects how customers are treated by those same employees.”

Cooper’s study focused on 90 elementary schools in Israel. “We tested how the rude behaviour of principals spirals down to teachers, their pedagogical supervisors and even students,” he says. “We found that in schools where principals were reported as being rude, teachers reported a greater degree of feeling unwelcomed and even at risk to speak up regarding issues at the school.” In addition, “supervisors who routinely oversee these teachers reported them as behaving rudely”, too.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is an unconscious process,” Cooper says.

So, does this mean that we are all at the mercy of our colleagues? Is teacher individuality destined to be eroded by subconscious mimicry? Are we all set to manage how our bosses manage?

Certainly, professional development researchers have emphasised for some time that the right culture can breed better teachers. This would seem to fit this research: get the culture right, and the mimicry should have a positive effect; get it wrong, and you are on a whirlpool descent to a negative effect.

But Bargh stresses that there are other variables. He believes that, in addition to unconscious imitation and mimicry, “conformity pressures on everyone” as well as “local and professional norms of conduct” in teaching “have removed a lot of individual variability over the years”.

And yet he adds that, even with these extra factors, you can still be uniquely you.

“Certainly [teachers] can be unique in their own classrooms, compared to other teachers,” Bargh says. “[There will be] clear differences between teachers at a given level. No one wants to be an automaton, and hopefully the sincere and dedicated teacher changes and adapts based on what works, and what doesn’t.”

In short, you may well be a magpie’s nest of habits and gestures, but that mix is still likely to be a unique one.

Chris Parr is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 10 July 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on…Picking up teacher habits”