Imitation of Peers in Children and Adults

Jose Apesteguia,Steffen Huck,Simon Weidenholzer,Elke Weidenholzer,Jörg Oechssler

doi:10.3390/g9010011

Abstract

Imitation of the successful choices of others is a simple and superficially attractive learning rule. It has been shown to be an important driving force for the strategic behavior of (young) adults. In this study we examine whether imitation is prevalent in the behavior of children aged between 8 and 10. Surprisingly, we find that imitation seems to be cognitively demanding. Most children in this age group ignore information about others, foregoing substantial learning opportunities. While this seems to contradict much of the literature in the field of psychology, we argue that success-based imitation of peers may be harder for children to perform than non-success-based imitation of adults.

Highlights

Imitation learning can be an attractive heuristic in many circumstances; it saves on decision costs and requires relatively low cognitive ability.1 Offerman and Schotter [2] have referred to it as “poor man’s rationality”
We find that imitation seems to be cognitively demanding. Most children in this age group ignore information about others, foregoing substantial learning opportunities. While this seems to contradict much of the literature in the field of psychology, we argue that success-based imitation of peers may be harder for children to perform than non-success-based imitation of adults
Vega-Redondo [3] observed that in Cournot games, imitation learning leads to the emergence of Walrasian states with payoffs lower than those obtained in the Nash equilibrium

Summary

Introduction

Imitation learning can be an attractive heuristic in many circumstances; it saves on decision costs and requires relatively low cognitive ability. Offerman and Schotter [2] have referred to it as “poor man’s rationality”. Imitation learning is far from being flawless, as under particular adverse circumstances it may lead to suboptimal outcomes. We have decided to cast our study in a setting where imitation is not self-harming, but will lead to outcomes with strictly higher payoffs than those received under rules that ignore information received by others. We study a multi-armed bandit problem where the distribution of payoffs across urns is unknown to subjects. In this setting, imitation is superficially attractive as in previously studied settings but payoff-improving as compared to only reinforcing one’s own previously successful actions. There is, a subgroup of children from elite schools that does better on average but still does not imitate as efficiently as university students

Related Literature

Experimental Design

Results

Conclusions