A fascinating article by Carl Zimmer, on an experiment which demonstrates how children tend to “over-imitate”, ie to copy the actions of their elders scrupulously even when those actions appear to have no purpose. Young chimps in the same situation, on the other hand, ignore the unnecessary steps and go straight for the result (opening a box to obtain food). It’s a surprising result, because at first sight it appears to show that the chimps are being more intelligent. But in fact it may point to an important element of human psychology:
Mr. Lyons [a Yale grad student seeking to replicate the original findings from the University of St. Andrews] sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.
As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn’t understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.
Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. “Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought,” Mr. Lyons said.
We don’t appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well. “It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way,” he added. “You have to create very artificial circumstances to see it.”
As a commenter at Metafilter) points out, Susan Blackmore in “The Meme Machine” proposed that imitation is a key human skill. Learning to speak would be inconceivable without it, and once we start to imitate each other memes take over from genes, and culture takes off (to boil down a whole argument into a single phrase). The down side, of course: we look for role models and strong leaders to show us the way.
OK, a lot to load onto a single experiment, but it is a particularly interesting one.
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