Not mentioned in the Wikipedia article, but in a referenced article [2]:
"Another puzzling phenomenon is that some male animals, men included, yawn in association with penile erection"
Not an answer but an expansion on the question: yawns are contagious among mammals. If you watch your cat yawn you're more likely to yawn and vice versa.
Well, the android is roughly mimicking a mammal. But more to that point, I've seen snakes yawn, and I then yawned. Reptiles generally seem to yawn and I'd bet they yawn when they see mammals yawn too.
Aww, snakes are cute though. You should think about spending some time around some docile snakes to challenge your aversion. Even through a glass tank wall, so you can feel rationally safe.
I remember yawn as a result of lack of oxygen and need for a deep breath. Maybe it was some reaction among animals where they breath even if not feeling lack of oxygen.
The journal is not Nature, it's Scientific Reports. This is a journal by the same publisher as Nature (which is why it's on the same domain) that will publish anything deemed "scientifically sound" by the reviewers, regardless of the (lack of) novelty and significance. It is very much not Nature.
Used to play a game when we were kids where one of us would start faking a yawn - stretching, contorting our mouths between words, breathing in as if trying to fight a yawn, trying to make the other person yawn before they realise.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 47.5 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joROEZQz178
Not mentioned in the Wikipedia article, but in a referenced article [2]: "Another puzzling phenomenon is that some male animals, men included, yawn in association with penile erection"
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna3076713
Read about it, mammals will yawn when other non-mammals yawn.
if a see a snake (yawning or otherwise) i'll definitely not yawn.
puking, screaming or running would be more likely.
IIRC, it wasn't that contagious.
Or, restated, they confirmed it was contagious.
Also, primates are naturally selected to act mutually. Whoever didn't do so lost the tribe and died.
That's just high me thinking though.
Occam’s razor.