Introduction
Human beings learn their environment by perceiving the processes of nature in order to imitate and manipulate them. An experiment done on the imitative capacity of human beings shows that children learn their environment better by imitating novel actions performed by the adults. Since children learn by imitation, they can over-imitate unnecessary actions that adults perform in the process of achieving certain goals.
“Children have been observed to over-imitate, or to reproduce an adult’s obviously irrelevant actions in several different contexts, even in situations where chimpanzees correctly ignored the unnecessary steps” (Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007, p. 19751). Since cognitive capacity of the children is greater than that of chimpanzees, it implies that over-imitation is due to norm learning. Therefore, norm learning explains better the over-imitative behaviours in children.
Summary of Empirical Studies
Empirical studies reveal that, over-imitative behaviours in children are due to demands of social norms. In the first empirical study, an experimenter conducted a novel experiment involving retrieval of marble balls from a transparent experimental set up.
The experimenter demonstrated severally how to retrieve the marble balls through a process with unnecessary actions for 4-year-old children to imitate. After demonstration, the children imitated the process of retrieving a marble ball, and the experimenter noted keenly if children could precede unnecessary actions when retrieving marble balls.
“Of the other 16, 13 performed the unnecessary action …compatible with the hypothesis that children have a declarative belief that the dial should be turned before retrieving the object, a belief that can be flexibly used to determine appropriate behaviour” (Kenward, Karlsson, & Persson, 2010, p. 4).
Since novel apparatus were transparent, the children could have avoided unnecessary actions while retrieving the marbles. The normative learning made the children to over-imitate unnecessary actions of the experimenter.
In second empirical study, the experimenter taught children how to manipulate a puppet by doing both necessary and unnecessary actions. Two groups of children, recognizing group and inventing group, manipulated the puppet according to the demonstration based on ostensive communication and incidental observation respectively.
According to the findings, “…young 3-year-old children jumped to a normative interpretation of an adult action based mainly on the way it was performed in terms of its intentionality, and possibly conventionality” (Schmidt, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2010, p.5).
The results imply that children over-imitate actions as norms necessary for achieving intended objectives when manipulating a puppet. The study also found out that children over-imitate actions more in recognizing environment as compared to the inventing environment. Thus, observation is very critical in development of normative behaviours by the children.
In the third empirical study, the experimenter trained 5-year old children on how to retrieve a dinosaur toy from a container while doing both necessary and unnecessary actions. The experimenter then taught children to identify the necessary and unnecessary actions in readiness for the next experiment where they could differentiate the two actions.
In the test experiment, the experimenter brought a complex container with turtle and instructed the children to retrieve a turtle using necessary actions only. Surprisingly, most children continually repeated the unnecessary actions during the short process of retrieving turtle meaning that, they had normatively observed the process of retrieving dinosaur.
According to Lyons, Young, and Keil, “directly warning participants to ignore unnecessary actions failed to attenuate over-imitation because despite deliberately monitoring for irrelevant steps, children continued to over-imitate as frequently as they did in training experiment” (2007, p.19755). These findings prove that over-imitative behaviour springs from the tendency of children to perceive actions as norms that require compliance.
Discussion and Integration of Empirical Research and Theoretical Research
The experiment involving retrieval of marble balls from transparent experimental set up clearly demonstrates how children over-imitated experimenter by performing unnecessary actions. The strengths of the experiment lie in the fact that there are no assumptions regarding the participants or the experiment itself.
Furthermore, the study also empirically illustrates how children can effectively over-imitate unnecessary actions without any external influence that can confound the results; therefore, the experiment is very simple for a 5-year old child to comprehend.
Nevertheless, the weakness of the research lies in the questions directed at the 5-year-old children. The children are too young to give coherent verbal reasons regarding necessary and unnecessary actions. The experimenter questions the children whether they can perform unnecessary actions and how they can avoid unnecessary questions.
These questions are very complex for the children because they do not fully comprehend the whole process; they just over-imitate actions of the experimenter. Hence, verbal answers from 5-year old children are not credible since their cognitive ability cannot allow them to give consistent and true answers to the questions.
In the puppet experiment, its strengths are in the comparative study of recognizing and inventing group as the experiment revealed that children learn better through observation rather than through their own rational abilities. As a weakness, manipulation of the puppet is very complex for the 3-year old children to comprehend.
In the dinosaur retrieval experiment, though children learned in advance to differentiate relevant and irrelevant actions, they were able to repeat irrelevant actions despite the experimenter’s instructions to avoid such actions; hence the strength of the experiment. The experiment proved that over-imitative behaviours of children lie in norm learning. However, the weakness rests on the fact that the experimenter over instructed the children during training and testing experiment, which might have influenced the outcome of the experiment.
Discussion and Integration of Evidence with My Arguments
The study supports the argument that, norm learning explains better the over-imitative behaviour in children since the experiment empirically illustrates how children perform both necessary and unnecessary actions in order to achieve certain goals.
The children do not question the process that the experimenter follows since they perceive them as critical actions that leads to the ultimate objective. As a norm, children adapt adult behaviours because they assume that whatever adults do is right and worth imitating. To the children, every action, whether necessary or unnecessary for achieving specific objectives, is taken as integral part of the whole process since social norms are diverse for a child to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant actions/behaviours.
Since children are still young with little experiences in different kinds of actions that they perform, they obtain their experiences by keenly observing actions of the adults. Therefore, over-imitative behaviour emanate from the desire to comply with social norms that determine one’s rewards or punishment.
Therefore, children think that their compliance with norms enables them to earn rewards rather than punishments from their adults. Hence, perceptions of actions from the normative point of view have made children become over-imitative even in unnecessary actions that do not require much rationalization.
Discussion of the Key Issues
Two schools of thought, norm learning and distorted causal learning, try to explain over-imitative behaviour in children. Norm learning assumes that children do not use their cognitive abilities when imitating adults, which makes them to over-imitate even unnecessary actions that have no meaning in achieving certain objectives.
The norm learning perspective of explaining the over-imitative behaviour needs to consider and integrate cognitive abilities of the children because they reason before performing necessary and unnecessary actions.
According to Lyons, Young, and Keil “Children who observe an adult intentionally manipulating a novel object have a strong tendency to encode all of the adult’s actions as causally meaningful, implicitly revising their causal understanding of the object accordingly” (2007, p.19751). This argument implies that children not only imitate actions and behaviours due to social norms, but also due to the cognitive ability to code and over-imitate.
Distorted causal learning on the other hand assumes that over-imitative behaviours come from the cognitive coding of behaviours and actions. Lyons, Young and Keil argue that, “children treat the purposeful actions that adults direct toward novel objects as a source of privileged causal information, automatically encoding those actions as causally meaningful even when there is clear visible evidence to the contrary” (2007, p.19752).
Distorted causal learning neglects the influence of social factors such as norms and interests towards certain actions that children have. There is possibility that children are superficially over-imitating the actions thinking that they are rules of a game because games have many unnecessary actions that need compliance for the sake of fun. Since children like games and fun, over-imitation may be part of social interaction that leads to fun and merry making. Thus, it is not enough to attribute over-imitation to the distorted causal learning.
Conclusion
Norm learning explains best the cause of over-imitative behaviours observed in children. The marble retrieval experiment clearly illustrates how children over-imitate unnecessary actions while retrieving marbles from the experimental set up.
Over-imitation of unnecessary actions implies that children have normative tendency in following instructions of the adults with view that there are right and wrong actions. Children view adults as source of morals and whatever they do is unquestionable, hence over-imitating their actions and behaviours. In a recap, over-imitation has formed the basis of learning throughout the process of human evolution.
References
Kenward, B., Karlsson, M., & Persson, J. (2010). Over-imitation is Better Explained by Norm Learning than by Distorted Causal Learning. Proceedings of the Royal Society. 1-9
Lyons, D., Young, A., & Keil, F. (2007). The Hidden Structure of Over-imitation. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, 104(50), 19751-19756.
Schmidt, M., Rakoczy, H., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Young Children Attribute Normativity To Novel actions without Pedagogy or Normative Language. Developmental Science, 1-10.