Imitative behavior in preschool children.

Abstract

The concept of imitation is of direct interest to psychologists in several areas. Behavior which is patterned after a model set by some external figure constitutes a notable portion of human activity and operates as a critical mechanism in certain complex behavior. The phenomenon of social learning, possible in the human organism because of elaborate skills of communication, enables man to profit by observation of others around him and thus to short-circuit the long-and tedious process of learning only through direct experience. This mechanism, especially in early childhood development, often derives from imitation. An older or more experienced person frequently serves as a guide for behavior before the imitating organism can "read" environmental cues for himself and behave independently in response to those cues. In later stages, the behavior of others serves to expose the imitator or direct his attention to relevant environmental cues. Miller and Dollard (1941) have proposed an analysis of imitation and social learning by synthesizing elements of Hullian learning theory with empirical observations of human social behavior. A series of experimental laboratory studies, using both animals and children, served initially to document their theoretical analysis. Several more recent experiments (Church, 1957;Schein, 1954;Solomon & Coles, 1954;Wilson, 1958) have further explored the implications of their basic hypotheses. ^£",~ The present study is designed to explore, "within a framework comparable to that em-1 The author is indebted to David H. Crowd! for handling the administration of the Parental Practices Research Scale, to Ruth Updcgraff, Rosalind Gold, and Nancy Mann for making available data from uncompleted M. A. research, and lo June Naumann for her assistance as an experimenter and experimental leader.

Patterns of Imitative Behavior in Young Children

“…Previous evidence (7,8) as well as the data of the present study (see Table i) suggest that nonimitation, rather than imitation, is the dominant tendency in such situations. The present data are, of course, based on responses to two-choice situations.…”

Identification as a process of incidental learning.

“…Although initially it was planned to follow the procedure used by Miller and Dollard (1941) in which one of two boxes was loaded with two rewards and the child made his choice immediately following the leader's trial, this procedure had to be modified when it became evident during pretesting that approximately 40% of the subjects invariably chose the opposite box from the model even though the nonimitative response was consistently unrewarded. McDavid (1959), in a recent study of imitative behavior in preschool children, encountered similar difficulties in that 44% of his subjects did not learn to imitate the leader even though the subjects were not informed as to whether the leader was or was not rewarded.…”

The competence of the model and the learning of imitation and non-imitation.

“…In such a situation it is not possible to evaluate independently the contribution to the imitative process of the two cues. An exception to this procedural confounding appears only in the work of McDavid (1959) who, when employing adult models for child imitators, did not reward the adults.…”