DID YOU KNOW: Why We Yawn and Why It’s So Contagious

75% of people are “contagious”—but not all of them

Seeing someone yawn makes you want to yawn. Hearing someone yawn makes you want to yawn. Reading the word “yawn” can make you want to yawn—you may have already felt this while reading this article. This phenomenon is called yawn echokinesis, a term coined by the neurologist Charcot to describe this involuntary echoing of a gesture. About 75% of people are susceptible to this contagion—the remaining 25% are resistant to it.

This contagion is not immediate: unlike a startle reflex, which is nearly instantaneous, a contagious yawn takes 1 to 3 minutes to occur after seeing someone else yawn. This delay is significant: it indicates that the mechanism is not simply a matter of automatic motor imitation, but rather a more complex neurological process involving the brain’s emotional regions.

Mirror Neurons and Empathy at the Heart of the Phenomenon

Early brain imaging studies, notably a 2003 Finnish study by Riitta Hari and Martin Schurmann, showed that watching someone yawn activates the superior temporal sulcus—a brain region involved in perceiving the movements of others’ eyes and mouths, and in processing social emotions. Several subsequent studies converged to show the activation of regions associated with empathy: the posterior cingulate cortex, the precuneus, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

A study published in 2017 in Current Biology by Georgina Jackson’s team at the University of Nottingham shed new light on the subject: by magnetically stimulating participants’ primary motor cortex, the researchers were able to increase their propensity to yawn contagiously. The excitability of the motor cortex appears to be the primary individual predictor of susceptibility to contagious yawning—accounting for approximately 50% of the variability among individuals. And paradoxically, asking participants to resist the urge to yawn actually increased that urge, rather than reducing it.

This discovery—that resisting the urge to yawn actually increases the urge to yawn—is one of my favorites in neuroscience. It’s the classic mechanism of thought suppression: thinking about not thinking about something is, in fact, thinking about that very thing. The brain is fundamentally bad at self-censorship.

The more you love someone, the more contagious their yawn is

A remarkable naturalistic study, published in PLOS ONE in 2011 by Ivan Norscia and Elisabetta Palagi, tracked contagious yawning in real-life groups of people—friends, family, coworkers, strangers—in natural settings. The clear result: contagion is highest among close relationships (family, close friends) and lowest among strangers. The frequency and speed of contagious yawning followed exactly the gradient of emotional connection: relatives > friends > acquaintances > strangers. This is the same gradient observed for empathy in other measures.

This correlation between contagious yawning and social bonds is consistent with the evolutionary hypothesis that yawning serves as a group synchronization mechanism. In a group where individuals share a strong emotional bond, synchronizing states of alertness (falling asleep together, waking up together) would have had adaptive value. Contagious yawning would thus be a neurological remnant of this ancestral social mechanism.

Autism, Reduced Empathy, and Insensitivity to Yawning

Another striking indication of the connection between contagious yawning and empathy: children with autism spectrum disorders, who have difficulties with empathy and theory of mind, are half as likely to be affected by contagious yawning as neurotypical children. Similarly, people with low self-reported empathy scores yawn less in response to contagious yawning. The ability to yawn contagiously may be an indirect marker of the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes—a very physical form of empathy that most of us practice without realizing it several times a day.

Simply reading about yawning is enough to trigger the urge, as research shows—proof that even mental imagery, without a direct sensory stimulus, activates the same neural circuits. This is a form of cognitive empathy: imagining someone else yawning is, in itself, potentially enough to make you yawn.

Contagious yawning as a marker of empathy is one of the most unexpected examples of how our most trivial behaviors reveal something profound about our social structure. Every time I yawn after someone else in a room, it’s a tiny, unconscious act of empathy. It’s almost beautiful.

What We Know, What We Don’t Know Yet

The science of yawning has advanced significantly over the past twenty years. We now know that spontaneous yawning is an archaic reflex linked to shifts in alertness and potentially to brain thermoregulation, rooted in the brain’s primitive structures. We know that contagious yawning involves brain circuits linked to empathy and social synchronization, and that the excitability of the primary motor cortex is an individual predictor of this susceptibility. What we still do not know precisely: the exact function of spontaneous yawning in adults, the precise molecular mechanisms of contagion, and why a minority of people are completely immune to it.

The next time you yawn

The next time you yawn, you can remind yourself that you’re repeating a reflex that’s hundreds of millions of years old—one shared with fish and lizards—that you first experienced in your mother’s womb, and that may say something about your empathy toward the people around you. It’s not just a sign of boredom—it’s a biological gesture of unexpected depth. And if you yawned while reading this: welcome to the 75% of empathetic humans.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist

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