I want to know… What do you people know of Behavioral Mimicry? That is, in humans, and not in animals. What I speak of is a person whose behaviour is affected from his immediate surrondings in direct ways.
I think I may have heard of it. Is it the thing babies do to learn, copying what adults or bigger children do?
If not I must have confused it with something else 
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But if it is, than it’s supposed to be the thing that made humans superior of apes, as human children copied what they’re parents had learned and putting these skills to use, learning more skills and passing them on to they’re children, apes apparently don’t do much of that. Or something along those lines 
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I am prone to mimicry. I am not sure if I consider it a fault or just a unique trait. In its basic form it happens during conversations with foreign people. All of a sudden I will start to pick up their accent based off of what I have heard from them. This happens subconsciously and I won’t notice it. Sometimes people will think I am doing it intentionaly as a way to poke fun, and sometimes someone will ask me if I am from their country. This happened alot when I worked a French Bakery \ Cafe.
Other times I find that if I spend a good amount of time around someone that I respect or admire their social habits \ mannerisms \ vocal inflections \ thought patterns will wear off on me. I will catch myself having a conversation with someone else and think, “wait… that’s how so and so would explain it \ think about \ talk”. or, “wow I sound like and I am responding just like so and so”
It’s a strange aspect of my mind that I’ve been trying to work with over time. Not sure if that’s exactly what you were refering to though, but it was the first thing that popped into my head after reading the post.
There are good forms of mimicry, for example styles of learning and when in new situations, we use it to ‘survive’.
Then there are the bad forms, when the person loses all sense of who they really are. There are too many people like that at my school, they copy each other’s fashion sense and they lose all sense of individuality and become a clone of the others around them.
In that sense, it makes me sick.
I once met a girl just like that, and I’m sorry to say that I didn’t believe her when she said it was subconscious. This was because when she picked up an accent, her version didn’t sound like a true accent - it sounded deliberate, and her inflections were noticeably different from the native speakers around her. So everybody else, including me, thought she was lying. But in hindsight, I think she might well have been telling the truth. If she’d picked it up subconsciously, that doesn’t make it any more likely that she would pick it up accurately. Accents can’t be copied so easily, after all - it takes many years for someone to sound like a true native. Many people never lose their foreign accent. Even in actors, it’s a very rare thing to find someone who can accurately copy an accent, and they’re making a conscious effort, with years of experience in mimicry.
Now this I can readily believe. I used to catch myself doing it myself in my early teens, quite unintentionally (considering they were mostly bad habits I was picking up). For some reason this stopped as I got older, though.
Aah, so this existis elsewhere aswell.
But wait, it must be somekind of an epidemic!!
Thank god I’m immune to that 
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But really, it IS disgusting how a leadfigure says that a stupid rap-hip-hop “song” is cool and everyone else agrees with him or her.
Those people either are not happy of who they are(which is stupid because existence is most likely pointless anyway) or they lack the brainpower to create a personality of they’re own 
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I landed myself into an incident like that once, with my pediatrician who has a heavy Indian accent. 
My mother said something that irked me and when I retaliated a makeshift Indian accent came out. Whoops. And Stormy, you can bet it wasn’t accurate. 
A while back, I’d sometimes stick my tongue in between my teeth when I laughed after observing it in a friend of mine. And there are probably a bunch of other mannerisms I’ve picked up from people over time. For a while back in tenth grade my thought processes became absorbed with trying to make up lame puns, jokes, and parodies of songs just because a teacher of mine did it all the time.
But really, these days, my ideal form of behavior would be spontaneous and flowing—not based off of anyone at all. Really, I’m best off listening to my Self. And the same applies to everyone.