Combining Imitation and Selective Trust Literatures

Introduction

• Children globally pay attention to cultural events like Christmas and birthdays.

• Individual families often have their own culturally specific practices for these events.

• Children possess a cognitive toolkit of social learning mechanisms.

• This toolkit facilitates quick and accurate acquisition of conventional behaviors.

• It also maintains cultural diversity across different populations (Legare, 2017; Lewis & Laland, 2012; Tomasello, 2016).

• Imitation serves as a social tool.

  • It satisfies social motivations.

  • Motivations include affiliating with in-group members and ensuring group status by adhering to group-specific norms (Nielsen, 2018; Over, 2020).

• Children acquire knowledge from adults' testimony.

  • Studied using the selective trust paradigm.

  • Children choose between knowledge sources for new information (Tong et al., 2020).

• Children filter and select reliable, trustworthy sources based on social markers (e.g., consensus, language) and epistemic characteristics (e.g., accuracy, competency; Harris et al., 2018).

• Research fields evaluate the interplay between social and instrumental/epistemic factors.

• Imitation and selective trust literatures offer different views and interpretations of children's social learning mechanisms.

• These findings and views are complementary, not contradictory.

• Imitation researchers view high-fidelity imitation as a social tool for affiliation (Nielsen & Blank, 2011) and norm adherence (Kenward, 2012; Keupp et al., 2013).

• Selective trust researchers emphasize children's ability to determine the most trustworthy person to learn from (Harris & Corriveau, 2011; Sobel & Kushnir, 2013).

• Children's imitative tendency may stem from selecting in-group members as ‘cultural experts’ with reliable group-specific knowledge, making their actions worth copying.

From Imitation to High-Fidelity Imitation

• Imitation capacity emerges early in life (Barr et al., 1996; Meltzoff, 1985, 1988).

• Infants develop the ability to identify intentions and goals of behaviors within their first 2 years.

• They rapidly acquire specific means of reaching those goals (Casler & Kelemen, 2005; Gergely et al., 1995).

• This involves learning and practicing instrumental skills like using utensils and assembling objects.

• Young children increasingly acquire and re-enact social conventions with age (Vredenburgh et al., 2015), even if it means compromising efficiency (Yu & Kushnir, 2014).

• Children faithfully copy an adult's arbitrary approach around age 2 (Nielsen, 2006).

• Nielsen (2006) study:

  • Children shown how to open a box using an object to push a button, even though using a hand was simpler.

  • 2-year-olds copied using the object, even when it led to task failure.

  • 12-month-olds preferred using their hands.

  • 18-month-olds imitated when the model was socially engaging (eye contact, responsiveness).

  • Social engagement didn't affect 2-year-olds; they were motivated to achieve the outcome and replicate the model's action when the model was socially active.

• This highlights children's increasing tendency to replicate arbitrary information and the influence of social interaction in social learning.

• Around 3–4 years, children replicate instrumentally relevant actions and faithfully replicate nonfunctional actions (e.g., swiping a box with a tool before opening it).

• Older children replicate ritual-like actions not directly on a target object (Clay et al., 2018; Nielsen et al., 2018).

• This is known as overimitation (Hoehl et al., 2019).

• During preschool years, imitation shifts from goal-oriented to process-oriented, prioritizing faithful replication.

• Gellén and Buttelmann (2019) found:

  • 1-year-olds copied using their head to switch on a light box (when hands were free) if the model's hands were free, but not if the model hid her hands (replicating Gergely et al., 2002).

  • 3-year-olds copied using their head regardless of the model's hand position.

• Being less goal-oriented doesn't mean sacrificing the desired outcome.

• Children replicate the ‘process’ even when the task has a different goal (Zhao et al., 2023).

  • Children followed the process of building a tower with pop sticks and marshmallows, regardless of whether the task was described as tower building or marshmallow collection.

  • Children in the marshmallow collection condition collected more treats.

• These data indicate that children value ‘process’ regardless of its efficiency.

• Imitation serves as a signal for social affiliation, conveying commitment to a group by behaving similarly (Nielsen & Blank, 2011).

• Children overimitate, even though they can identify and skip irrelevant actions (Lyons et al., 2011) or verbally acknowledge that the actions are unnecessary (Kenward, 2012).

• They perceive these actions as ‘normative rules’ (Kenward, 2012; Keupp et al., 2013) and enforce social norms on others (Schmidt, Hardecker, & Tomasello, 2016; Schmidt & Tomasello, 2012).

• Prevailing view: high-fidelity imitation is driven by strong social motivations (Nielsen, 2018; Over, 2020; Over & Carpenter, 2012).

• It's an inclination towards recognizing conventional rules and fulfilling normative expectations of behaving in equal ways.

Social Deference

• Children show heightened imitation of models who resemble themselves (Wood et al., 2013).

• Children use social markers to guide imitative decisions, determine from whom to learn, and identify in-group members.

• They also use social markers to identify normatively accepted behaviors/preferences within their cultural in-group (Rakoczy & Schmidt, 2013).

• Infants as young as 3 months show stronger preference for faces of their own race (Bar-Haim et al., 2006; Kelly et al., 2005).

• Children use spoken language as a social category marker to guide decisions about whose information to acquire (Kinzler et al., 2010).

• 11-month-olds show enhanced brain activity when interacting with native speakers (Begus et al., 2016).

• 14-month-olds imitate actions by native language speakers more strongly (Buttelmann et al., 2013), also found in 3-year-olds (Howard et al., 2015).

• Altınok et al. (2022) revealed the same effect with 18-month-olds.

• Subtle differences in accent also likely affect social preference.

• By 4 years, children prefer information from native-accented speakers (Kinzler et al., 2011).

• Kinzler et al. (2011) study:

  • Children heard two models speak with native or foreign accents and then silently demonstrate object functions.

  • Children preferred learning from the native-accented model, regardless of the model's instructions or nonlinguistic information.

• Identifying social conventions uniquely attributed to one's cultural group is essential for children's learning (Diesendruck & Markson, 2011).

• Consensus is a straightforward cue indicating conventional behavior (Legare & Nielsen, 2015).

  • Can be induced verbally (e.g., ‘everyone always does it this way’) (Clegg & Legare, 2016) or by contrasting a majority with a minority (Wilks et al., 2015).

• Nonverbal cues like nodding and head shaking guide children's decisions (Schillaci & Kelemen, 2014).

• Fusaro and Harris (2008) study:

  • 4-year-olds copied actions modeled by someone supported by a group through smiles and head nods, rather than someone who received frowns and head shakes.

• Children rely on social markers to guide decisions about whose information and behavior to follow, perceiving it as socially approved cultural knowledge.

• ‘Selectivity’ is conceptualized differently in imitation and trust fields—as a social form of affiliation vs. an epistemic form of trusting a credible information source.

• Integrating these concepts will enrich our understanding of children's social cognition.

Epistemic Trust and Selective Imitation

• By 4 years, children develop strong instrumental judgments and don't always copy others.

• This cognitive skill resists potential pitfalls or erroneous information.

• Selective trust literature focuses on recognizing epistemic characteristics (e.g., accuracy) that signal an informant's reliability (Pasquini et al., 2007).

• It also involves selectively avoiding informants who have demonstrated inaccurate information or malicious intentions (Sperber et al., 2010).

• Children prefer learning from previously accurate informants.

• Meta-analytic findings:

  • When informants differed in epistemic and social characteristics, 3-year-olds weighed them equivalently.

  • 4- to 6-year-olds prioritized epistemic cues (Tong et al., 2020).

• Examples:

  • 4-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) are unlikely to trust a familiar teacher with a history of inaccurate decisions (Corriveau, Harris, et al., 2009).

  • They are likely to eschew labels suggested by an in-group member with low past accuracy (Corriveau, Kinzler, & Harris, 2013).

• Although children prefer learning from a consensus, they may not if the information is questionable (Corriveau, Fusaro, & Harris, 2009).

• Schillaci and Kelemen (2014) study:

  • Children watched a video of adults commenting on novel artifacts.

  • In ‘weak’ trials, the majority suggested an alternative but plausible function, while the minority suggested another plausible function (e.g., using a spongy tool to polish shoes vs. clean CDs).

  • In ‘strong’ trials, the majority suggested an implausible function (e.g., using a spiral egg cup to drink from) against the minority's plausible function (using it to hold an egg).

  • In weak trials, children showed no preference, but in strong trials, 4-year-olds avoided the implausible functions.

  • This was only the case for 4-year-olds but not for 3-year-olds.

• This epistemic decision-making is consistent with findings in the imitation literature.

• Wilks, Collier-Baker and Nielsen (2015) study:

  • Preschool children observed two methods for opening a puzzle box by a consensus group (majority) and an individual (minority).

  • Children were assigned to the majority group.

  • When both methods led to success, children copied the in-group way.

  • If the in-group method failed, they copied the lone individual.

• DiYanni & Kelemen (2008) study of ineffective tool use:

  • Children presented with a goal (crushing a cookie) and observed a model rejecting a functional tool for a nonfunctional one.

  • Most children chose the functional tool, overlooking the model's cues.

• This low imitation of an ineffective method has been replicated (Corriveau et al., 2017; DiYanni et al., 2015; Fong, Sommer, et al., 2021).

• This pattern was less stable in 3-year-olds; emphasizing the socially preferred tool enhanced their choice of the suboptimal tool (DiYanni & Kelemen, 2008; Fong, Sommer, et al., 2021).

• Understanding the intended goal and excluding flawed methods is essential for a functioning cultural group (Carpenter & Call, 2009).

• 3-year-olds' social learning is modulated by social cues, while 4 years appears to be a point at which children display rational judgment of whom to trust and what to learn.

Children as Cultural Learners, Informants as Cultural Experts

• Imitation and selective trust researchers study social learning using different theoretical frameworks and experimental paradigms.

• Findings from both fields share analogically similar theoretical underpinnings and offer complementary explanations.

• Children are driven to replicate others to satisfy social motivations, and selectively trust researchers depict children's preference for a social model as a reliable information source.

• Children flexibly switch between social/conventional and instrumental/perceptual modes of social learning (Corriveau & Harris, 2010; Legare & Nielsen, 2015).

• Children, viewed as young anthropologists (Harris, 2012), select reliable informants to acquire cultural knowledge.

• Social models (who share characteristics with the learner) may be perceived as cultural experts with useful knowledge.

• A social model may not always be a cultural expert, even if they share identities like nationality or gender.

• Expertise in selective trust studies is manipulated based on domain-specific instrumental knowledge (Clegg et al., 2019; Koenig & Jaswal, 2011) rather than cultural knowledge.

• Some researchers focus on social dominance as a trust inducer (Bernard et al., 2016; Margoni et al., 2022), while Henrich and Gil-White (2001) refer to prestige, learning from skilled individuals with cultural understanding.

• Future research should investigate social informants as cultural experts delivering cultural knowledge.

• Cultural environment factors (socialization goals, societal expectations; Keller et al., 2006) guide children's social learning.

• Examples include parenting styles (Reifen Tagar et al., 2014), social dominance (Charafeddine et al., 2018; Fonn et al., 2022), temperament (Canfield et al., 2015), and attachment type (Corriveau, Fusaro, & Harris, 2009; Corriveau, Harris, et al., 2009).

• These factors vary across diverse within- and between-population settings.

• Cultural context shapes children's social learning decisions.

• Studies show an impact of consensus and cultural group on imitation of ineffective tool use only within Asian-American children (Corriveau et al., 2017; DiYanni et al., 2015).

• Indigenous Australian children used a more collaborative strategy (Nielsen et al., 2016).

• ni-Vanuatu children replicated ritual-like actions (Clegg & Legare, 2016), and Indigenous Malaysian children replicate less efficient methods (Fong, Redshaw, & Nielsen, 2021).

• The impact of social information on epistemic decisions may vary across cultural groups.

• Researchers rely on demographic measures and ethnographies to interpret results and draw inferences.

• More efforts are needed to develop measures that assess individual differences as cultural factors (Fong et al., 2022; Puttre & Corriveau, 2022).

• The imitation literature extensively documents children's behavioral patterns in acquiring norms, focusing on what behaviors are replicated.

• The selective trust literature provides insights into children's cognitive processes of selecting whose information to follow.

• One explanation for social affiliation through imitation is that children trust these models as reliable sources of culturally-relevant information.

• Allen et al. (2021) showed that children are less likely to overimitate when the demonstrator has a history of inaccuracy, and Rakoczy et al. (2009) showed that children protest against deviance from information endorsed by a reliable model.

• Dragon and Poulin-Dubois (2023) failed to associate children's selective trust responses with their overimitation task performance.

  • Their selective trust task involved informants' accuracy, not social characteristics and their overimitation task evaluated imitative fidelity of conventional acts on common items demonstrated by a lone model via Zoom.

• Future research should include selective trust tasks involving social decisions and novel overimitation tasks.

Summary

• The imitation literature has research on children's developing imitative proclivities, and the selective trust literature offers evidence and theorization on children's developing epistemic vigilance.

• Social biases guide children's decisions on whom to trust, and epistemic vigilance plays a role in selective imitation.

• Combining the two approaches with investigations into individual differences and cultural factors will provide a holistic understanding of social learning mechanisms.

• It will enable us to elucidate which aspects of social learning can be conceptualized using evolutionary explanations and what psychological processes may be shaped by cultural or environmental factors.

• Future investigations will shed light on our flexibility and adaptability towards changing cultural or ecological demands, focusing on how selective trust and high-fidelity imitation may work in tandem.

• Understanding of cultural evolution will be richer with efforts at more fully integrating different fields of social cognitive developmental research.

Endnote

• Overimitation is a subtype of high-fidelity imitation that involves replicating functionally irrelevant or ritual-like actions.

• It differs from replicating arbitrary actions, less effective methods, or suboptimal methods because the actions are functionally relevant to reach the end goal.