The Social Side of Imitation

Children’s imitation is a profoundly social process. Although previous developmental accounts of imitation have focused on imitation as a way to learn from others, the current article stresses that imitation goes far beyond this: It is often intimately tied to children’s need to belong to the group and their drive to affiliate with those around them. Accordingly, imitation is chiefly determined by the social motivations and pressures children experience within both interpersonal and intergroup settings. This perspective resolves an apparent paradox in the empirical literature, explaining why children sometimes copy selectively and sometimes copy faithfully (so-called overimitation). It also situates the developmental and comparative study of imitation and cultural transmission within a broader social-psychological framework, uniting it conceptually with research on mimicry, conformity, normativity, and group membership. KEYWORDS—imitation; group membership; social pressure Human culture is qualitatively different from that of any other species. Although other species—including chimpanzees, our closest living primate relatives—show some variation between groups in how they deal with the physical, and even the social, world (Whiten et al., 2001), this variation is dwarfed by the breadth and depth of the differences among human groups. Human groups differ not only in the cultural artifacts they produce but also in the social conventions they adhere to, the types of relationships they form, and the beliefs and attitudes they hold about the world. To understand the creation and maintenance of human culture, we must understand how information is transmitted across generations through social learning and, in particular, through imitation. However, the empirical literature on early imitation presents an apparent paradox: Whereas children sometimes copy selectively (e.g., copying intentional actions, but not mistakes or failed attempts), at other times, they copy surprisingly faithfully. In fact, children sometimes copy so faithfully that they reproduce actions that are irrelevant to achieving the task at hand (so-called overimitation; Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007). This apparent paradox between selective and faithful imitation can be resolved only by considering the social side of imitation (see also Over & Carpenter, 2012a). Humans’ dependence on their group members has created a series of social motivations and pressures that together exert a profound influence over imitation. This perspective contrasts sharply with many previous accounts of cultural transmission that have tended to neglect the social context in which imitation is produced (e.g., Lyons, Damrosch, Lin, Macris, & Keil, 2011; Whiten, McGuigan, MarshallPescini, & Hopper, 2009). Here, we briefly review these accounts and then provide an alternative, social-psychological account of imitation and cultural transmission. Previous Accounts of Children’s Imitation Recent accounts of imitation have focused on explaining the existence of overimitation. Most of these explanations focus on children’s need to learn about causally opaque cultural artifacts (i.e., objects whose causal properties are not immediately obvious). Whiten et al. (2009), for example, have argued that, due to the rich cultural environment in which children grow up, it benefits them to copy observed actions faithfully. The small percentage of these actions that prove irrelevant can be weeded out later through individual learning. Relatedly, Lyons et al. (2011) proposed that children have an automatic tendency to encode all of a model’s intentionally produced, object-directed actions as causally necessary, and that this leads them to imitate faithfully even when it appears irrational to do so. According to Lyons et al. (2007), the automatic nature of the bias makes Harriet Over, Department for Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Malinda Carpenter, Department for Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Harriet Over, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig 04103, Germany; e-mail: [email protected].