Overimitation

Overimitation is the tendency, documented especially strongly in young children, to faithfully copy every step an adult demonstrates in order to achieve a goal, including steps that are causally unnecessary or irrelevant to actually reaching that goal, even when a more direct and efficient method is plainly visible to the child. The researchers Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten documented the phenomenon in an influential comparative 2005 study, showing that while young children reliably reproduced an adult demonstrator's irrelevant actions on a puzzle box even after seeing that those actions had no effect on releasing a reward, chimpanzees presented with the identical demonstration instead filtered out the unnecessary steps and used only the actions that were causally effective; the developmental psychologist Derek Lyons and his colleagues extended this line of research in 2007, finding that children continued to overimitate irrelevant actions even when explicitly told to be as efficient as possible and even when they could clearly identify, on later questioning, which of the demonstrated actions had actually been unnecessary. Researchers have proposed that overimitation reflects a deeply rooted human tendency toward high-fidelity social learning and cultural transmission, on the view that faithfully copying an entire observed action sequence, rather than selectively reasoning about which individual steps are causally necessary, was on balance an adaptive strategy across human evolutionary history for reliably acquiring complex, opaque cultural tools and practices whose full functional logic a child could not otherwise be expected to work out alone. The phenomenon has since been documented across a wide range of cultures, ages, and task types, though its strength varies somewhat depending on factors such as the social relationship between the child and the demonstrator.