Children will comprehensively copy others' actions despite manifest perceptual cues to their causal ineffectiveness. In experiment 1 we demonstrate that children will overimitate in this way even when the arbitrary actions copied are used as part of a process to achieve an outcome for someone else. We subsequently show in experiment 2 that children will omit arbitrary actions, but only if the actions are to achieve a clear, functional goal for a naïve adult. These findings highlight how readily children adopt what appear to be conventional behaviors, even when faced with a clear demonstration of their negligible functional value. We show how a child's strong, early-emerging propensity for overimitation reveals a sensitivity for ritualistic behavior.
CITATION STYLE
Nielsen, M., Kapitány, R., & Elkins, R. (2015). The perpetuation of ritualistic actions as revealed by young children’s transmission of normative behavior. Evolution and Human Behavior, 36(3), 191–198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.11.002
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