A dual-process perspective on over-imitation

Children and adults tend to imitate actions that are causally irrelevant to accomplishing a goal; they “over-imitate.” It has been discussed that humans over-imitate either because of erroneous causal reasoning, meaning that they do not recognize demonstrated actions as being irrelevant, or because of social motivation, for example, because they want to follow a norm or affiliate with the demonstrator. Recent findings give reason to believe that...