The Cognitive Impact of Ritually Driven Imitation

Baseball Rituals

The Pittsburgh Pirates had in 2012 set a major league record for futility with the team’s 20th consecutive season below .500. Then, almost miraculously, from 2013-2015, the Pirates emerged as one of the best teams in baseball with the second-best regular season record in the majors in 2015. The Pirates’ closer during most of that period was Jason Grilli, who was named to the National League All-Star team in 2013.

Grilli holds another distinction. David Israel ranks him among the top ten in an article on baseball players’ rituals. Grilli earned this recognition by virtue of eating linguini with clam sauce before all of his starts for Italy in the World Baseball Classic in 2009 and for his ritual, as a youngster, of putting the baseball card of Nolan Ryan, the pitcher with the most strikeouts and most no-hitters in history, in his shoe on the days that he pitched. Of course, Grilli is but one among scores of baseball players who carry out such rituals in the pursuit of their profession.

Overimitation

Cultural evolutionists stress human beings’ dispositions to imitate the behavior of persons renowned for their skills. Imitation is a major mechanism for cultural transmission, and experimental evidence suggests that this propensity is so exaggerated in Homo sapiens compared with other species that it merits the description “overimitation.” For example, children but not apes will slavishly imitate causally irrelevant steps in a modeled action sequence, even when they know it is causally irrelevant.

Skilled individuals’ rituals, though, might seem to pose a problem for cultural learners. That includes innumerable children over the years interested in becoming baseball stars, since any connection between the players’ rituals and their success is unclear at best. In observing skilled individuals, learners need to know what and how much of their behavior to imitate.

Cristine Legare (Psychology, Texas) and Harvey Whitehouse (Anthropology, Oxford) have also suggested that it is advantageous, in any given case, to have some sense of the grounds for imitating behavior. Should the behavior be imitated because it plays a straightforward causal role in the development of skill or should it be imitated because it conforms to social conventions that carry normative force with regard to some endeavor (e.g., ritual)?

Correspondingly, either of at least two stances, viz., an instrumental stance or a normative stance, might drive such imitation. For novices especially, situations of the first sort may be as causally opaque as situations of the second sort. Clearly, children need to acquire facility with both, and overimitation is a relatively safe strategy to pursue in both sorts of cases. If learners overimitate regardless, is there any evidence that children do make this distinction, at least implicitly?

The Normative Stance Inspires Imitative Fidelity

Legare, Whitehouse, and colleagues have proposed that young children are already sensitive to cues that suggest whether contexts and behaviors call for adopting the instrumental or the normative stance and that that determination influences both their cognition and behavior.

Experiments they conducted with 4- to 6-year-olds suggest, contrary to widespread assumptions, that when they take the normative stance, children are more faithful and comprehensive imitators, more sensitive to deviations, and less likely to introduce new elements than when they take the instrumental stance. This was true whether the cues about the stimuli were verbal (e.g., “this is how we do it”) or not (e.g., behaviors that are causally opaque and leave things just as they were in the first place).

They and the cultural evolutionists suggest that humans have an early-developing norm psychology that is driven by affiliative goals and that is every bit as important as the psychology underlying the management of instrumental challenges.