Faithful Imitation Research Articles

Over-imitating preschoolers believe unnecessary actions are normative and enforce their performance by a third party

Over-imitation, which is common in children, is the imitation of elements of an action sequence that are clearly unnecessary for reaching the final goal. A variety of cognitive mechanisms have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. Here, 48 3- and 5-year-olds together with a puppet observed an adult demonstrate instrumental tasks that included an unnecessary action. Failure of the puppet to perform the unnecessary action resulted in spontaneous protest by the majority of the children, with some using normative language. Children also protested in comparison tasks in which the puppet violated convention or instrumental rationality. Protest in response to the puppet’s omission of unnecessary action occurred even after the puppet’s successful achievement of the goal. This observation is not compatible with the hypothesis that the primary cause of over-imitation is that children believe the unnecessary action causes the goal. There are multiple domains that children may believe determine the unnecessary action’s normativity, two being social convention and instrumental rationality. Because the demonstration provides no information about which domains are relevant, children are capable of encoding apparently unnecessary action as normative without information as to which domain determines the unnecessary action’s normativity. This study demonstrates an early link between two processes of fundamental importance for human culture: faithful imitation and the adherence to and enforcement of norms.

What Holbein & Lockey Captured in The Family of Sir Thomas More: A Family “furnished for the whole scope of human life”

This article explores the striking differences between the predominantly religious scene in Holbein’s 1526/27 Basel drawing of the More family and the predominantly secular scene found in the Holbein/Lockey 1530/1593 oil portrait of the More family found at Nostell Priory. This paper suggests a reading of both works of art, including an interpretation for the choice of the specific books by Seneca and Boethius in the Nostell Priory portrait. It also reviews the history of the portrait, indicating that Holbein probably began this oil painting, or at least prepared the canvas, and that Lockey completed it as a faithful imitation of the original.

Editorial

'God as one who does not like to keep a secret, although supremely able to do so?' Jaroslav Pelikan, in response to a question in Toronto several years ago, hazarded this as an apt description. By that he meant, of course, that it is of the very nature of God to share ungrudgingly; that we cannot rightly think of the divine as gleefully hugging knowledge to her breast, the better to maintain her power, but rather as dispensing it generously and joyously. This latter perception marked the beginning of formal trinitarian theology in the second century, and it is in faithful imitation of this divine liberality that theological writing worth the name goes on today. Those who seek truth wish to share the insights that seeking brings them.