The science case of body doubling
You may have used body doubling for years without knowing the term. Think about working in a café or library: you're surrounded by people, but not directly interacting with them. Researchers have described this kind of experience as diffuse sociality [1], where the simple presence of others can make it easier to focus. In the first academic study of body doubling, Eagle and colleagues found that many participants reported using it to help start, persist with, and complete tasks, often long before they knew there was a name for the practice [2].
Body doubling first emerged within neurodivergent communities and has gained popularity since COVID. A variant already exists in academia in the form of Shut Up and Write. Body doubling retains many of the same benefits while removing the time-bound structure. The key difference is flexibility: there is no set start time, finish time, or expectation that everyone remains for the whole session; people can come and go as it suits them. More broadly, body doubling can also be used for non-work activities like chores, exercise and errands.
How does body doubling work? A number of psychological theories offer insight in how another person's actions or presence can influence our own behaviour.
Mirror neurons [3] have been a subject of intrigue within psychology and neuroscience for decades. They react to the actions we take and similar actions we observe others taking, and potentially account for the human abilities to empathise and imitate. Mirror neurons are thought to underpin some foundational aspects of body doubling, although the exact mechanism is uncertain. Interestingly, these neural circuits are thought to be disrupted in autistic brains [4].
The Hawthorne Effect [5] describes how natural behaviour changes when subjects are observed. This effect is primarily documented in the context of research study participant behaviours, but we can draw some informal implications: it's psychologically difficult to stand still when everyone's running, to chit-chat when your boss is in the room, or, in the case of body doubling, to slack when your camera light is on!
Allport's social facilitation theory [6] posits that performance increases when working on the same task as another person in close proximity to them. The underlying mechanism is evolutionarily automatic: rivalry and competition. Body doubling differs somewhat, appearing to be less about performance but rather motivation, task initiation, and completion. Additionally, body doubling can happen without participants working on the same task. Anyone who has become more productive after opening a laptop beside a colleague at a conference may recognise the effect.
Within the autism community, “echopraxia” is a concept relating to the imitation of others’ actions and the use of social relations for motivation and action [7, 8].
Body doubling may not work for everyone, though, and some kinds of work are best done alone. Exams, or writing where you really don't want disruption, are obvious examples. The best way to find out whether it works for you is simply to try it.
Think of it as a small experiment: try one session and see how you feel. Here is a simple “behavioural manual” to get you started:
Join on mute, or with audio completely disconnected ("deafen")
Say a quick hello and what you're working on, or get straight to work
Drop out when you're done
We'd love to have you join us. See you in our Zoom room soon.
References
[1] Burgess, E. R., Ringland, K. E., Nicholas, J., Knapp, A. A., Eschler, J., Mohr, D. C., & Reddy, M. C. (2019). “I think people are powerful”: The sociality of individuals managing depression. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1–29.
[2] Eagle, T., Baltaxe-Admony, L. B., & Ringland, K. E. (2024). “It was something I naturally found worked and heard about later”: An investigation of body doubling with neurodivergent participants. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, 17(3), Article 16, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689648
[3] Bonini, L., Rotunno, C., Arcuri, E., & Gallese, V. (2022). Mirror neurons 30 years later: Implications and applications. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(9), 767–781. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.06.003
[4] Vivanti, G., & Rogers, S. J. (2014). Autism and the mirror neuron system: Insights from learning and teaching. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1644), Article 20130184. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0184
[5] McCambridge, J., Witton, J., & Elbourne, D. R. (2014). Systematic review of the Hawthorne effect: New concepts are needed to study research participation effects. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 67(3), 267–277. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2013.08.015
[6] Allport, F. H. (1924). Social psychology. Houghton Mifflin.
[7] Stengel, E. (1947). A clinical and psychological study of echo-reactions. Journal of Mental Science, 93, 598–612. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.93.392.598
[8] Williams, R. M., & Park, C. (2023). Cyborg assemblages: How autistic adults construct sociotechnical networks to support cognitive function. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–15). Association for Computing Machinery.