Culture is usually defined as some set of traditions that has to be learned as novel behaviors (rather than instinctual behaviors) that must then be transmitted to young members of a group or lost. At one time we thought humans were the only creatures capable of culture, but something similar has been observed not just among primates but also birds, meerkats, and even fish.
What's remarkable is that this isn't more common. If an animal can learn, why aren't they all learning new things then transmitting that information? Why do we do it so much more?
It seems that there is something unusual about humans when it comes to our drive to imitate: we mimic what we see to a much greater degree than other animals. There is some reason to think that this has also played an important role in the development of religion and why it religion is able to retain so many ancient elements, no matter how counter-productive they may be.
Michael Balter writes in the July 16, 2010 edition of Science
Derek Lyons, a developmental psychologist at UC Irvine, presented new data on a phenomenon in young children that he and others think may be key to humans' faithful transmission of complex culture: "overimitation," or the tendency to copy the actions of an adult even when they are unnecessary for achieving a goal. No other animal has been shown to copy in this way, Lyons and others say.
Lyons's work builds on a landmark 2005 study by Whiten and primatologist Victoria Horner, now at Emory University in Atlanta. They demonstrated that when young chimpanzees and children are shown how to retrieve a reward from a box using a series of both relevant and irrelevant steps, the chimps skipped the unnecessary steps, whereas children tended to imitate everything. Recent work by another team suggests that overimitation is universal in human children.
Whereas animals taught how to get the food focus on getting the job done -- and thus eliminate extraneous steps as soon as possible -- children seem to focus foremost on the process and thus imitate every step no matter how silly. Only by explaining to the kids that some step is definitely unnecessary and was perhaps even included accidentally can the researchers get them to stop doing it. I wonder if there is a connection here with OCD behavior -- if perhaps the source of such behavior is just natural and necessary human impulses that are going a bit haywire?
Simply watching someone else perform the task more quickly and efficiently without the extra steps isn't enough. So unambiguous evidence that some action not only isn't helpful, but is in fact counter-productive, doesn't cause a child to cease doing it once they have been taught to do it. The only thing which gets them to drop the unnecessary action is to be taught by the same authority figure that they don't need it anymore and that it's OK to continue on without it. The parallels to religion are striking.
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