Abstract
The current study avoided the typical laboratory context to determine instead whether over-imitation—the disposition to copy even visibly, causally unnecessary actions—occurs in a real-world context in which participants are unaware of being in an experiment. We disguised a puzzle-box task as an interactive item available to the public within a science engagement zone of Edinburgh Zoo. As a member of the public approached, a confederate acting as a zoo visitor retrieved a reward from the box using a sequence of actions containing both causally relevant and irrelevant elements. Despite the absence of intentional demonstration, or social pressure to copy, a majority of both child and even adult observers included all causally irrelevant actions in their reproduction. This occurred even though causal irrelevance appeared manifest because of the transparency of the puzzle-box. That over-imitation occurred so readily in a naturalistic context, devoid of social interaction and pressure, suggests that humans are opportunistic social learners throughout the lifespan, copying the actions of other individuals even when these actions are not intentionally demonstrated, and their causal significance is not readily apparent. The disposition to copy comprehensively, even when a mere onlooker, likely provides humans, irrespective of their age, with a powerful mechanism to extract maximal information from the social environment.
Highlights
As a species humans are highly effective social learners, frequently capitalizing on the knowledge and experience of others to acquire useful new behaviors [1, 2]
This may be true in the domain of tools and artefacts where the function of novel objects is frequently opaque [4], so that this can be a context in which learning from others is extremely valuable, it leaves observers at the mercy of the competence of the demonstrating individual. It may appear at first glance surprising that human social learning could be so vulnerable to the acquisition of ‘unwanted’ behaviors, a suite of experiments have suggested that is the acquisition of suboptimal behavior possible [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12], it can be extremely resistant to attempts to inhibit it [13,14,15]
Of initial interest in the analysis was whether the participants would copy the irrelevant actions performed by the ‘model’ when observing these actions in a naturalistic context, and whether any over-imitation witnessed would vary according to the age of the observer
Summary
As a species humans are highly effective social learners, frequently capitalizing on the knowledge and experience of others to acquire useful new behaviors [1, 2]. Social rather than individual learning is likely to be extremely useful in many circumstances, circumventing the problem of naïve individuals having to acquire new skills through trial and error, a process which could potentially be costly in terms of time and effort. Over-Imitation Occurs in a Naturalistic Context are readily apparent, but there is a less obvious pitfall to this process in that the indiscriminate (over)application of social learning may lead observers to acquire suboptimal behavioral variants [3] This may be true in the domain of tools and artefacts where the function of novel objects is frequently opaque [4], so that this can be a context in which learning from others is extremely valuable, it leaves observers at the mercy of the competence of the demonstrating individual. The precision of such copying, by children and adults alike, has been found to extend even to stylistic details in the way in which the individual irrelevant actions were performed [10, 16]
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