Imitation and culture: what gives?

Abstract

What is the relationship between imitation and culture? This article charts how definitions of imitation have changed in the last century, distinguishes three senses of “culture” used by contemporary evolutionists (Culture1 – Culture3), and summarises current disagreement about the relationship between imitation and culture. I trace the roots of this disagreement to ambiguities in the distinction between imitation and emulation, and to confusion between two projects that motivate research on cultural evolution – the anthropocentric project and the cultural selection project. Combing out these tangles and highlighting research on neonatal imitation in monkeys and humans, I argue that the relationship between imitation and culture goes both ways. Imitation gives cultural evolution an inheritance mechanism for communicative and gestural skills (but not technological skills), and cultural selection yields the cognitive mechanisms that make imitation possible.

Tradition and invention: The bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution

“…Another important mechanism question asks whether the ritual and instrumental stances differentially recruit imitation and emulation. In imitation, narrowly defined, the observer copies body movements – the way that parts of the body move relative to one another (e.g., fist to chin) – whereas in emulation, the observer reproduces object movements (e.g., purple cube to red peg) (Heyes, 1993; Heyes, 2021a; 2021b; Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993). Given that many group-defining communicative and ritual actions are intransitive, consisting of gestures and postures that do not involve objects (such as rhythmic dancing, marching, and more generally rituals that rely on joint and synchronous movements; Hove & Risen, 2009; Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009), it is likely that the ritual stance primes imitation more strongly than the instrumental stance.…”

Bifocal stance theory: An effort to broaden, extend, and clarify

“…More broadly, however, Packer & Cole argue that we do not pay enough heed to the cognitive mechanisms involved in social learning and imitation. One of us has devoted decades to studying these mechanisms (e.g., Heyes, 1994; 2012, 2021), but they are not a focus of the current article because stances are not reducible to social learning and imitation. Stances depend on motivational, attentional, and (possibly) executive processes that differentially recruit mechanisms of social learning and imitation.…”