Einfühlung: Overview of Theory Components and Test in Advertising Settings

Einfühlung describes processes of imitating the postures, movements, and emotions of other people, which lead to immediate sensations of oneness of the observer with these people. The fundamentals of this theory have been developed by historical German philosophers more than a hundred years ago. Contemporary researchers added theories and empirical findings (concept of the malleable self, mirror neurons, EMG and fMRI-based studies). We identified two gaps in this research. First, while there are some publications that we attribute to research on Einfühlung, there is a lack of an overview of the entire model that combines its elements, e.g., sensations of oneness are not clearly investigated. We present the historical conceptual model of Einfühlung and then report the major lines of research to date. Second, we consider advertising in the mass-media and assume that viewers of commercials can develop Einfühlung with actresses and actors when these persons’ movements provide opportunities for bodily and emotional imitations. The theory of Einfühlung could therefore be a topic in research on advertising effectiveness and therefore tested in this field. We created pairs of promotional videos – one that offered more opportunity for bodily and emotional imitation of actresses and actors and one that provided fewer such opportunities – for a large sample of brands and non-profit-organizations and tested the model of Einfühlung. Our results show that commercials are more effective when they offer more opportunities for imitation.