*Patreon Preview* Decoding Academia 8: Monkey see, Monkey do?
Ahead of the Jaron Lanier episode a special preview episode of our ongoing Decoding Academia series.This week Matt and Chris take a look at a classic comparative study of social learning processes in chimpanzees and infants (Horner & Whiten, 2005). They discover the correct method to break into a puzzle box, that chimpanzees are sometimes more logical than people, and that popular idioms do not always house universal truths.For anyone interested in reading the paper it is available for free here.We will be back later in the week with our normal decoding episode.
I have a very important science business to be doing.
But the good news is I've mainly finished it all and I get to have a bit of a rest.
So I'm looking forward to doing more decoding academias more quickly over the coming months.
Yes, we are.
We are sorry for various delays on the main podcast and the bonus content and whatnot.
We're just going through a little bit of a busy period with academic malarkey.
And Matt has been more productive than me, but I think that's not a good sign.
I still have a large amount of work I need to get done as well.
So anyway, we are here today to talk about a paper.
By Victoria Horner and Andrew Witten from 2005, Matt.
And it's from Animal Cognition.
It's a comparative psychology study comparing chimpanzees and homo sapiens, humans.
That's us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, we aren't children anymore, but, you know, similar.
The juveniles of our species.
The younglings.
Yes, I'm familiar with them.
Yeah, the younglings.
I have been familiar with them.
Yeah, so before we get into it, Chris, this was suggested by you, and a very good suggestion, may I say.
Well done.
Good job.
Has there been lots of papers following up on this, or what's the word, replicating it, that kind of thing, since, just out of curiosity?
Yeah.
Yeah, there has.
I think, even still now, a fairly active area of research.
I think it's been a while since they've done that many more with the puzzle box, but the observation, I believe, has been replicated and is robust, especially with human subjects,
where it's obviously easier to do these kind of experiments.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Good, good, good, good, good, good.
Yeah, so the topic is, as the title suggests, causal knowledge and imitation, emulation switching in chimpanzees and children.
And the reason I wanted to look at this, apart from it being a neat experimental study and a good example of why comparative studies are useful, right?
Animal and human behavior is also because I think that this is another paper which shows how, you know, a broadly evolutionary approach to examining topics can be productive and can tell us interesting things.
So comparing our closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees doing tasks and how they differ from us.
Can it help us identify something interesting about people?
And I actually think the result, Matt, is relevant to the topic that we cover on the show, as we'll get to.
So, you know, people sometimes ask us for examples of good evolutionary psychology or evolutionary applications to human behavior.
I think this is a good example of that kind of thing.
Yeah, I think it's kind of wrong to think of evolutionary psychology as its own specific little thing that's separate from everything else.
I think of it more as that the biological substrate is intertwined with pretty much everything you study in psychology.
I mean, look at this.
This is the textbook from...
The unit that I'm teaching at the moment.
It's basically...
The student's guide to cognitive neuroscience.
Yeah, that's it.
And it's all neurology, right?
Matt is holding up a picture of a brain.
I'm doing the audio description for people, Matt.
Good man.
You're a real pro.
Yeah, so it was a picture showing all the little squishy bits of the brain, the neuroanatomy, and we look at the functionality of it, and it just can't be overstated that we share...
Almost all of those squishy little bits with pan troglodytes, the chimpanzees in question here.
You know, there are important differences, but there's an awful lot in common as well.
And it is not like an abstract computing spiritual device.
It's very much grounded in squishy, yucky biology.
And yeah, so I'm all for it, understanding that.
So, yeah, I just noticed, by the way, chimpanzees, pan troglodytes, that's the scientific name.
I didn't know that.
That seems like a, you know, troglodytes.
Yeah, troglodytes.
Yeah, I know, poor guys, but, you know, that's science.
It was probably decided in the Victorian era or something.
But in any case, Matt, what this is, is an experimental study.
I'll mention the broad methodological.
Design, because I think it's interesting.
No?
No, I think we should, can we talk through the introduction first?
Because I want to just give people the rundown on the concepts.
Please?
Fine, fine.
Well, okay.
In that case, I think the crucial thing that it's identifying for me in the introduction is the distinction between emulation and imitation, which are probably...
Distinctions that most people don't think of.
And this is a good illustration of why you need technical language to highlight specific differences in behaviors.
And the technical difference that they want to argue for here is that emulation involves copying the behavior that you observe in order to reach a goal.
But essentially, being willing to drop...
Parts if you can do it more efficiently or if you can work out.
So you're like looking at, you're watching another person or another conspecific of your species do a behavior and you're working out the how to achieve a goal or what causal patterns are involved.
But you don't necessarily need to imitate exactly what they do to achieve it.
Whereas imitation is much more Copying exactly what you observe, including actions which you might consider inefficient or causally irrelevant.
So imitation is more...
The funny thing is that the phrase monkey see, monkey do.
It creates the image of just pure imitation.
You don't understand what you're doing, so you just copy exactly.
But that's what they mean more here by imitation.
Emulation doesn't require exact copy.
Yeah.
So the key thing about emulation is that it's about focusing on the affordances of the tools there, the ways in which you can use them, and the causal mechanisms by which you achieve your goal.
So it's the underlying functionality that gets copied as opposed to the rote thing.
So if I picked up a pair of tongs and picked up a squeegee and then used that to wipe down my desk, and then I said, okay, Go ahead, clean the desk.
The little kid watching it or the chimpanzee could, if they wanted to cut straight to the chase, could just pick up the squeegee and wipe down the desk and skip out the bit of the tong using the tongs, which isn't helping achieve the goal.
And there's a nice example from another experiment I know where there's an experimenter who has his arms encumbered, right?
He's holding a bunch of heavy books.
And he uses his head to push a button on the table, right?
Because his arms are in use.
And the question then is, you know, if you were emulating the behavior and you give someone to push the button and your arms are not encumbered, you should just push the button, right, with your hand.
Imitation would be that you pick up the heavy books as well or, you know, you use your head, right?
Like, so that kind of thing.
The other thing that's worth mentioning is that the broader context here is social learning, right?
So, yeah, which we just should mention, which is that whether you're a human or a chimpanzee, observing another member, another conspecific, doing something is an opportunity for you to learn adaptive behavior, how to interact with the world in order to get what you want.
So, you know, humans do that.
Chimpanzees do it.
Various other social animals do it.
Also worth noting that conspecific is the technical word used when people are talking about members of the same species.
Comparative studies include people that, or include not people, they include animals.
Not people, so that's why we use the word conspecific.
And I probably shouldn't use it because in this experiment, they got a person to demonstrate things to a monkey.
Right, but you're correct that chimpanzees do learn from conspecifics.
They learn from other chimpanzees socially.
So social learning is a topic of great interest within evolutionary biology and ecological kind of studies.
Yeah, so the really interesting thing there when it comes to imitation versus emulation as these different types of social learning, I guess the intuitive evaluation of it is that emulation reflects a kind of deeper learning,
right?
So you're not just slavishly copying the form by rote, but rather you are understanding the underlying intention.
First principles, Matt.
First principles, that's it.
Brett Weinstein is a creature of emulation.
He builds from first principles.
Maybe that's actually confusing because he doesn't even want to switch.
Like I said, that expression monkey see, monkey do is implying that monkeys People will more use imitation than emulation.
They'll just copy things.
That's right.
They don't understand the deep principles at play.
They don't understand causality and so on.
They just imitate.
They ape each other's behavior, Chris.
They ape each other's behavior.
I know.
This is an example where language reflects a lot about our...
Judgments around other primates.
And in any case, a good example is, you know, young children like with a toy who will mimic the movements of adults.
Like, you know, if you're cutting the grass or something and they walk with a toy grass cutter, you know, imitating what you're doing but not producing the result, right?
This would be a funny example that you can see images of.
So that's it.
It is an important distinction.
Emulation seems to be the more sophisticated reasoning process, and imitation seems to require less processing power because you're just copying exactly what is done.
And more discussion of that later.
So yeah, Chris, we'll now go to study one, which is what you wanted to do before.
It is.
So I'm not going to go through...
In like terrible detail because there's actually quite a lot they do in order to, you know, randomize certain elements of the experiment, counterbalance presentations and stuff like that.
But I think that's probably too technical for us to get into.
But the basic thing that they do in the experiment is they present in experiment one.
This is specifically with chimpanzees.
And they present a sample of chimpanzees with these so-called puzzle boxes.
And the puzzle boxes are of two varieties.
One is opaque.
You cannot see the mechanisms inside.
And the other is clear and see-through.
And the boxes have these designs where they have a kind of upper section and a bottom section.
And there's an entrance on the top and an entrance on the bottom.
So you can kind of push things across, a bolt on the top, and then if you so want it, poke a tool into the space at the top.
And you can do so at the bottom where there's a little front door that you can prise open or slide open.
And the reward, for the chimpanzees, there is a food reward, which is in the bottom compartment, right?
So the part that is...
Kind of relevant about this causal inference issue is that in the opaque box, you cannot see what you're doing inside the box.
So if you poke things into the top, you can't tell exactly what it's doing to any mechanisms and vice versa for the bottom.
On the see-through box, you can see that the top compartment is not mechanically connected to the bottom.
So you can poke something in, but it doesn't cause anything in the bottom compartment.
So the food reward is in the bottom compartment.
And if you want to get the food reward, you don't need to do anything with the top compartment.
And you can see that with the clear box.
You cannot see that in the opaque box.
Yes, that's clear.
You made that.
Okay, that's clear.
So I made it clear like the box.
An experimenter, not a chimpanzee, as Pat mentioned, demonstrate how to open this box and extract the food reward.
And they do so, actions that are focused on the top part of the box, like tapping the bolt and then sliding it and poking the tool inside.
And then they have actions which are actually relevant to extracting the food reward, which is focused on the bottom half of the box, right?
The experimenter demonstrates a bunch of irrelevant actions and then a bunch of relevant actions to extract the food.
And the question is, when the chimpanzees are presented with these two types of boxes, what do they do to extract the food?
If they're imitating, they should be copying all of the actions, including the ones at the top of the box.
And if they are emulating...
Then they will ignore the top of the box and focus on the actions at the bottom, at least in the see-through condition.
That's right, in the see-through condition.
In the opaque condition, you'd probably expect them to do all of the actions, the irrelevant and the relevant ones, because there's no way to know which are the ones that actually got you the reward.
Yeah, maybe there's a button you're pushing in the top box or some mechanism that you're activating, right?
You can't tell, so that's...
Why?
And they did do it.
They had the chimpanzees either encounter these boxes in the order of opaque first and then clear or clear first and then opaque, right?
So they had that control in there.
Question, Chris, what's the difference between groups A and B and groups C and D?
So there's counterbalancing with the order of opaque and clear.
I just, I read this before and I got bored trying to figure out that and I just moved on.
What was the...
I would have to go back and see, but it's, if you look at like table one, it says experimental design for groups A to D. A and B worked with the opaque box first and then the clear box.
There's different shaded arrows there.
What's that shaded error?
It must be something to do with the...
Methods.
It was the method that was used.
Yeah, so it's like a slight variation on the way that the...
Because there were different mechanisms that can open the door, right?
It can be slided or it can be like hooked open.
That's right.
Cool.
They were also interested in like whether they use the method that they were taught or, you know...
So this was another thing.
But I wasn't even going to mention that, Matt, and you forced me to now.
You're right.
Okay, good.
Good.
Okay, that makes sense.
So what did they find in the first experiment?
Well, so it's an interesting result for the viewers that have the luxury of the video.
I'll just display it so they can see what we're talking about.
But the thing that they found was that the chimpanzees who encountered the opaque box, they did about 60% of the irrelevant actions on the top.
They copied them.
When they then were presented next with the clear box, this dropped to like around 20%, right?
There's error bars, but this is rough speaking about the averages.
In the opposite condition, when they first encountered the clear box, they basically didn't copy any of the irrelevant actions.
It's near at the floor level.
And then when they were presented with the opaque box, They continued to mostly ignore the irrelevant actions.
They only copied about 10% or so of the actions, right?
But this result is quite clear that they are taking account.
So when they can see the mechanism, they are not copying most of the irrelevant actions.
So it suggests emulation is at play, right?
Not Slavish imitation.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
And so the...
Chris, just before we move on, scroll up and just show the people the pictures of the monkey.
Yeah, there we are.
There he is.
There's a little guy.
There he is with the opaque box.
He seems to be looking like he's going to have a go at the top there in slide A. Must be one of the monkeys that were atypical or maybe in the other condition.
And then the second one, yeah, he's going in the lower part of the box at the front.
Clever guy.
Yeah, and I'll also note that this is a study with a sample of only 12 chimpanzees, young chimpanzees.
I thought it said 34. No, did it?
No.
At the time of the study.
Oh, sorry.
No, sorry.
I misread that.
That's the total population of the chimpanzees.
That we're at the shelter.
And by the way, this was not one of those terrible studies with chimpanzees kept in cages and treated very badly.
These are rescued chimpanzees at a chimpanzee sanctuary in Uganda.
And there's quite a lot of descriptions of the life they live in.
It sounds pretty good, actually.
The reason for that, Matt, is also important because there is some...
Criticism that studies done with captive chimpanzees that they are acculturated to humans.
And so they're not good models for wild chimpanzees, but they want to make the point that these chimpanzees have time foraging in actual normal ecological environments.
They're not kept in the zoo enclosure, right?
That's right.
And their enclosure is pretty natural and they get some time to go in the forest actually and have some Have some roaming around.
So, yeah, it's technically in captivity, but they don't live in an artificial environment.
Yeah, so the interesting thing then, next from this, so that's like, you know, the result is pretty clear, and because the sample is small, but because they...
Get them to repeat so many trials, they can increase the power of the study by getting them to take part in additional trials.
So that's one way you can partly address issues of low power from sample sizes.
But they then move, and this is an interesting part of this paper to me, that they have an experiment two and experiment three where they...
Take the same chimpanzees and they basically conduct experiments to look at their abilities of kind of causal reasoning.
And I find this interesting because it was kind of a robustness check to make sure that the chimpanzees have the ability to reason in the way that would make the experiment understandable, right?
Yeah, so just maybe you can clarify this.
So they say there that experiment one, there was a big reduction in the reproduction of irrelevant actions in the clear condition.
And so clearly the chimpanzees, well, not clearly.
It's probable that the chimpanzees recognised that the tool couldn't make physical contact with the reward doing those irrelevant things.
But they say that it doesn't really totally prove that such an appreciation existed.
And so what's the alternative explanations?
Why doesn't it prove that?
I don't remember what the alternative possibility was, but they clearly wanted to exclude that criticism.
Presented the chimpanzees with a bunch of scenarios where they had two rakes and they could pull the reward but they could choose which rake to pull and then they could pull the rake and only one of the rakes was kind of capable of pulling the reward so if they selected the wrong rake they would like be able to pull it in the same way but they wouldn't be able to make it like pull in the reward towards them so
This was to show that if they are able to reason about tool use and producing the relevant actions, they should prefer the rake that will get them the positive result, right?
And they did.
Yeah, so it's kind of about the physical connection of the objects.
It's kind of a small point in a way, but it's a nice little thing there too.
To show that it was this causal reasoning that was leading the chimpanzees to cut to the chase and just work with the lower part of the clear box.
Because they understand about the principle of tools need to be in contact with the object in order to have an effect on it.
Yeah.
And then experiment three, the chimpanzees, they...
They had a similar thing with the REIC and now the reward was kind of enclosed in a box and they were looking at whether they had the ability to identify that a barrier would be able to,
a see-through barrier would be able to prevent them from accessing the reward.
So you need to be able to insert the tool to extract the reward, right?
So they have the option to pull these two boxes toward them, but only one of them would allow them to extract the reward with the tool.
And this was indicating that they could kind of understand the connection between using a tool to get a reward and how barriers function.
That's what I keep thinking.
I think that's the point.
They went to the baller of testing this, trying to look at whether the chimpanzees actually have the abilities to causally reason in the way that the experiment suggests that they can.
And it's nice.
It's like a nice robust way to show that they can reason about the basic causal principles involved.
I only have one criticism of this paper so far, and that's just in the results section of experiment three.
They say Spearman's row equals negative 1.36.
Rho is like a correlation coefficient, and it has to be between minus 1 and 1. Maybe it must be a typo.
You've got worries, Matt.
Get concerned.
What does that mean, Chris?
It's them reporting a non-correlation, so yeah.
And then above that, they say Spearman's P, capital P, equals 0.08.
Well, Matt.
What does that mean?
That is just a typo, obviously.
That's a typo.
Just saying.
It's not perfect.
Sloppy.
Sloppy, Chris.
These are the kind of indications that Alexandros Marinos would say.
Aha!
What the hell is going on here?
You know, there's obvious this is fraud.
And the thing is, you should be, when you notice things like this in the paper, It should give you pause and you should realize that people can make mistakes, figures can be reported incorrectly, and especially older papers, the statistics have to be examined with more skepticism because there was more,
I think, a greater willingness to play around than now.
At least people are more aware of the dangers of doing so now.
Yeah.
No, no, that's just a formatting thing with the P and the row.
I know that.
I'm sure it's negative.
I'm sure it's negative 0.36 is what they meant, not 1.36.
And, you know, we have to remember they're not statisticians, they're just primatologists, so we can't expect too much.
How dare you, man.
How dare you.
So, yeah, the… Anyway, the result shows that the chimps, you know, they're comparing this to chance, right?
Because they have a 50% chance of getting the correct answer and they show that, you know, the median response was 75 times correct out of the option.
So it's above chance.
And anyway, with these two experiments, they've indicated that their interpretation is better supported for what the chimpanzees are up to.
So it's good.
So where we are now is we've figured out that the chimpanzees are doing emulation primarily rather than imitation.
And also they're doing it clearly because they understand the physical causal mechanism at play.
That's what they've established.
Yes.
So now they come to experiment four, which is a comparative study with a child sample.
So they get 16 children.
Again, quite a small study sample size.
But in any case, it doesn't mean the results are going to be non-informative.
But they run an experiment which is designed to replicate what they did with the chimpanzees, with children.
They changed the reward because children are more motivated by Velcro cartoon stickers, apparently, than chimpanzee food.
But they do the same thing and they demonstrate to the children how to open the box and then they look at what the children do.
And for those that are watching along at home, you can see that the graphs look very different.
What we see with the kids is that in both...
The opaque and clear conditions, you might expect, right, children being potentially smarter than chimpanzees, humans in general, having a higher level intelligence than chimps, that, you know, children will work out the underlying principles and they will,
you know, have less of this copying irrelevant actions.
But no, Matt.
Instead, we find in all conditions, opaque and clear, You get a large amount of replication of irrelevant actions.
So you get 70 in the opaque condition, more in the clear condition.
And unlike the chimpanzees who transferred the knowledge where they encountered the clear box and they were like, oh, we don't need to do all that stupid stuff you're doing at the top.
So we're not going to do now on this opaque box either.
The human children encounter the clear box, they copy most of the irrelevant actions, and then they get the opaque box, and they continue to copy the irrelevant actions.
So it is the human children who are more monkey-see-monkey-do imitator types than the chimpanzees, who are not monkeys, but in popular imagination are often referred to as monkeys.
Another harmful stereotype crashed.
Thank you, science.
You can just tell people, monkeys have tails.
Ips don't.
There we go.
Simple.
Simple.
Yeah, so that's pretty interesting.
And they followed the same process, really.
Like the children, they did shout out.
So when the demonstrator got the reward, they went, I've got it.
But that's the only thing they said.
And the kids and the chimpanzees were sort of sitting in the same spot looking at the thing from the same angle.
So it all seems nicely controlled.
So it seems like a good solid result.
And on the topic of sample size, one thing that's always worth emphasizing is that what's too big, what's too small a sample size really depends hugely on the situation.
Like in simple terms, it needs to be big enough to detect the effect that you're interested in finding.
And that effect is defined relative to the amount of other random stuff that's going on.
So in a highly controlled experiment, you need a smaller sample size.
And if you're looking for something that's extremely species-typical, then there's going to be less individual variation as well.
So it's not necessarily...
It might indicate that you'd feel more comfortable if it got replicated, that's all.
Yes, and true.
And I want to mention that one element of the study was looking at the groups being taught these different methods for opening the door to retrieve the reward.
And when the chimpanzees...
You see the difference between the groups, because you can open the door in two different ways, but they modeled only one type of door opening for each group.
And you see that in the chimpanzee groups, they are copying the model that's demonstrated, but there's a kind of variation in the second group,
right?
Some of them are using methods that they didn't see, around 40% or 30%, depending on the opaque or clear.
But that's showing that they are copying what they've been shown more than just randomly selecting between the two methods.
But when you get to the human children, the interesting thing is that you just see complete adherence, right?
If they are shown...
One method, that is what they use, the push bolt, whereas in the other method, it's at zero, right?
So that's interesting to me.
Yeah, it is.
So on one hand, you've got the children are much stronger imitators as opposed to emulators, but at the same time, they're much more reliable imitators.
Whether it's imitation or emulation, they much more reliably do the same approach that the demonstrator did.
Yeah, so I really like this experiment, and it does go on to be replicated, and it also goes on to be replicated with adults who imitate irrelevant actions as well, with a similar level of fidelity as children.
This is an interesting notion because it suggests, you know, that counter to the stereotype, that the ability to override causal inferences and to take social cues that you should imitate what you are shown with high fidelity is perhaps something specifically Human ability that we are very good at,
which is early developing.
On the one hand, it can seem like a potential limitation, right?
Because people are not automatically trying to work out the underlying mechanisms, but it doesn't necessarily mean that.
It just means that they might still be working out the mechanisms, but be...
Thinking that it's important.
But imitating anyway.
Yeah, what they're showing.
Yeah, and they talk about this in discussions.
It's super interesting.
So on one hand, we know that it's not like a deficit in human children to not understand causality, I think.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's not that, right?
But what you're saying is what it is rather that that understanding is sort of overridden by a proclivity towards...
You know, specific imitation, even if you don't understand the purpose of the steps.
And you can see good adaptive reasons for both emulation and imitation, right?
So on one hand, emulation is good because you can generalize more if you understand the actual causal system that is at play.
Then when presented with a slightly different situation or whatever, you can modify what you do to suit the different situation.
On the other hand, imitation, there is advantages to that as well because, let's face it, these are just little kids.
They may not understand the reasons why you shouldn't put your hand on the hot plate or understand a whole bunch of different things, but presumably the person who's older than you That the people in your group that you're copying are doing it for a good reason.
And so there can be a real advantage to imitation, which is, yeah, like learning stuff that you don't necessarily understand the reasons for.
Those reasons might become clear to you later or not.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think it's an interesting thing to think about because, you know, this links to my area of research because rituals.
In many respects are causally opaque.
People don't understand, you know, how rituals are supposed to work, of course, like religious rituals, but even basic things like what is the causal principle for why a bow or a handshake is the thing of greeting, right?
It isn't.
It's a convention.
And ritualized behaviors and ritual activity can seem...
When people try to analyze it from the perspective of working out logical connections, it can fall apart.
It can rely on magical causality and these kind of incorrect inferences.
But the ability to accurately imitate and to pick up cultural conventions and to perform rituals correctly.
It's a very clear social signal and it's part of how people assess people that they meet, right, if they have cultural fluency.
And so, as a social species, the ability to imitate and the desire to recognize ritualistic or conventional actions and to reproduce them, you know,
it seems to be a very important part of all human...
And we differentiate societies by the kinds of rituals and conventions that we use.
So I think it's really interesting.
And the tenuous link I want to make to the gurus is that if you are able to make something seem esoteric and that it looks from the outside as if it's doing You know,
something complex.
If you're able to adopt a form, I think it can be difficult for people to discern, you know, they're not looking at all these underlying principles.
They're just pattern matching and looking for conventions, right?
And so this is why if you can imitate the kind of trappings of scientific...
And you can look that you have a lot of complex scientific knowledge, that people get the signal that you are somebody worthy of attention and that they should pay heed to.
Yeah, yeah.
When I got to the end of this paper, I knew why you liked it, because of the connection to ritual.
And look, this is certainly...
Look, I mean, if we find a difference between humans and chimpanzees, then it's indicated that it's something, especially in young children, then it's an indication that it's likely something that arose recently in our evolutionary past.
Within like six million years.
So it's recent in evolutionary terms.
Recent in evolutionary terms.
That's right.
But one of the other things that, of course, has happened even more recently than that is this massive explosion in human culture.
So lots of animals have culture, but human culture is special just because there's so goddamn much of it.
It's had this massive snowballing effect over the last however many hundreds or thousands or years.
So this actually...
Provides a pretty neat clue as to the evolved or biological substrate to that capacity to generate and perpetuate culture.
So if you have this sort of proclivity towards hyper-imitation, there may well be downsides to that, and we could talk about ritual as one of them.
But just one of the other downsides is just doing stuff that in general serves no purpose.
You keep doing it.
Your offspring and everyone else is copying.
We're all social creatures and we keep doing a whole bunch of things that may not serve any functional purpose.
So that's sort of the cost of it.
But the benefit of it is that it just enhances the replication of culture such that anything that is learned and is useful by anyone in the group gets perpetuated and isn't
lost when they die.
And obviously the acquisition of language and then ultimately writing and stuff like that played a massive role in this as well.
So, for me, it gives a way to understand or explain why there is so much ritual in human cultures, why Religion and ritual and spirituality of various kinds in a ritualized sense is just so universal.
And it's because of exactly that, this hyper-imitation.
Which can lead to the feeling that you just have to do these things.
It's very important to do these things.
We can't really explain why.
We just kind of know what it is.
And then we might invent some post-hoc rationalizations to explain it later on.
It also gels with what we see in the behavioral research, by the way.
So this is just a bit of a tenuous link as well, Chris.
But what do you think about this?
Like, we know with experiments in those Skinner boxes, when you put a pigeon...
Into a box.
It's getting those random rewards and so on.
These pigeons generate these random sort of pigeon rituals, these sorts of behaviors that have no real causal and functional relationship to the rewards coming, but they just kind of develop them.
So humans tend to develop random magical sort of beliefs about things that will...
Things that will be good, you know, like little people who avoid stepping on cracks on the sidewalk or, you know, a lot of compulsive disorders and stuff have the same issue.
So, yeah, I just think it fits in terms of that, you know, we're hyper-acquisitive learners such that sometimes we learn stuff that actually doesn't always have a useful causal functional role.
And then with hyperacquisitive social learners, which means that these kind of functionless behaviors, as long as they don't incur too great a cost in some way, shape, or form, can easily get perpetuated and spread and maintained through societies and cultures.
So, yeah, I also think, Matt, this topic is so...
It went on to spawn this research area called over imitation, right?
This is what the phenomenon came to be known.
And there's now been like a decade of research on it, right?
And like, what triggers it when, you know, the role that judgments of intentionality play in it and so on.
So like, I just noticed there's a review paper from Yeah, that gave us a comprehensive review of 54 published studies about over-imitation.
I haven't read it, but that, you know, that's the nice thing about these areas is, you know, and science in general, people go on, there will be groups that claim, you know, this experiment is misinterpreting what is actually going on and so on.
So if you find the topic interesting, probably be Good to follow up and go look at the review paper, which itself might be biased depending on the proclivities of the researchers.
That's right.
This isn't our area, so it could well be that there's a more sophisticated interpretation of what's going on here than our speculations.
But you mentioned intentionality there, Chris, and that was another thing I wanted to briefly talk about, which is that...
You know, they put it in terms of that the divergent results for children and chimpanzees could be due to differences in inferring intentionality, right?
So that sort of stuck out to me because that is something, a topic that interests me a great deal.
We definitely do think, like, humans do have a strongly agent-based way of looking at the world, perhaps a hyper-agent-based view of the world in such as the case that we can sometimes attribute the, you know, random Kind of environmental effects like lightning and something like that to being in an understanding in agent-based terms,
like, you know, the sky god is angry with you or something.
And even conspiracy theorists, right?
So conspiracy theorists tend to over-attribute events like, you know, the world might be going into a recession now, right?
Instead of it being the outcome of a, you know, a complex system with no one really controlling it, you know, a conspiracy theorist will tend to think of it in terms of...
Oh, well, you know, these powerful people would ever want that to happen now because of X, Y, and Z, right?
So this sort of strong inference regarding intentionality.
Now, the thing about this experiment is that all of the steps, both the irrelevant ones and the relevant ones that the demonstrator conducted were clearly intentional.
Yes.
Right?
Yeah.
And so the hypothesis here is that children are focused on intention.
And this gels with that explanation, which is, look, if an adult is doing something, if this is the steps that they're doing intentionally, well, then a good heuristic is, well, they wouldn't be doing it for no reason at all.
There must be a good reason for it.
So you could think of another way of understanding is in terms of a sort of a chimpanzee deficit in terms of intentionality, right?
Not being so much kind of social thinkers and social reasoners and just going, well, there's a...
Not putting themselves in the place of the mind of the other chimpanzee who's demonstrating.
So I thought that was an interesting angle too.
I can spoil it for you as well, Matt, that the subsequent research demonstrated that children do not copy actions where they are perceived to be unintentional or accidental.
So intention is important to getting the...
Yeah.
Imitation.
And yeah, and obviously that this is then, again, very relevant for ritual behavior, which has a clear, intentional signifiers to it, right?
And I think I've told it on the podcast before, but whenever people behave in a way that has ritualistic connotations around you, you will find that it is very difficult not...
To respond in kind, for example, by stopping to talk or to pay attention to what is going on.
If someone approaches you carrying something in a very ritualistic manner, it attracts attention and you assume there's some reason why they're doing that.
Yeah, that's right.
And when you're in a crowd of people, right, and the crowd of people for some reason just sort of might walk like this, just walk through this sort of thing and avoid this just for no apparent reason.
You'll tend to do the same thing because we're conformists and we assume that these people are doing it for a good reason.
Unfortunately, sometimes it can be that...
Superstitions and irrational belief in ghosts.
Everyone could be copying...
This is how those group dynamics occur where you find a whole group of people doing something extremely stupid because everyone's copying everyone else.
Assuming that somebody is doing it for a good reason.
So you can get this feedback effect.
But there you go.
You have these people.
They're agent-based thinkers.
They're imitators.
And can sometimes lead them to superstitious and pointless behaviors.
It's a good...
I like this study and I like this whole area of research because it's a reminder that humans, we are special in...
Comparison to other animals, like obviously because of our cultural, cumulative culture abilities.
Far outstrip, outstrip.
What's that word?
Surpass.
Outstrip.
Surpass.
Surpass other animals.
Yeah, that's it.
But it's a roll of the evolutionary dice, right?
I mean, I'm not saying imitation is the only factor here, but this...
Could be a very core component that allowed us to generate cumulative culture.
And it's a mistake, right?
Or it's not a mistake.
It is just a feature of the way our cognition worked.
And it happens to be very good for enabling cumulative culture.
But there are lots of other things which could have produced that and could have dominated the earth instead of us.
I understand what you're saying, and that was something that I sort of came away from this too, which is like, you know, our brains are big, but they're not that big.
You know what I mean?
They're not ridiculously big compared to chimpanzees, but our culture, like building space shuttles and stuff like that, does dwarf the sort of technical accomplishments of chimpanzees, right?
And it's not attributable to sort of this...
Kind of innate or just like so much capacity, you know what I mean?
Like these massive brains per se.
I mean, it'll have a little bit to do with that, but a much more interesting reason for it is that it could be a bunch of these sort of heuristics, essentially, which when put together, as you say, create this cumulative culture.
And there's been a real interesting shift in the way people seem to be thinking about that.
That whole question of what makes people special or what makes humans special.
Originally, the presumption was man, the toolmaker.
You know what I mean?
It was harnessing fire, tools.
Basically, the thought there was our superior engineering ability, right?
Our superior technical engineering.
Capacity to be able to create and increasingly complicated tools to interact with our environment.
But, you know, as this sort of experiment shows, you know, the chimpanzees in this case are better engineers than the children.
Admittedly, they're only two or three years old.
You know, I know, and I'm sure you're familiar with this, Matt, that there is a lot of argument that it's to do with, like, relative neocortex ratio.
Like, this is...
Part of the unique aspect of the structure of human brains, right?
Which make us particularly capable of higher reasoning and social complexity.
Because our neocortex ratio is double that of chimpanzees, right?
And much higher than...
Yeah.
But even two times is not a big amount.
Or whatever proportion it is, I've forgotten.
It's certainly ballooned.
And we've got these big heads proportional to our body size.
But it's...
I'm saying it's probably more than that.
You know what I mean?
It's more than just general purpose kind of reasoning.
Yeah, and I think that there's one thing that stuck out to me when you're looking at comparative studies.
There's all this interesting stuff going on with social animals and also animals with limited sociality but complex behaviors like cephalopods, the cuttlefish and so on.
But when you look at other animals that use tools, like chimpanzees, for example, and you look at the archaeological record, there isn't a cumulative improvement in their tool usage.
They are not redesigning how they use the twigs to poke for the ants.
And when you look at human species tool use, there's a massive period.
Of very limited improvement, very slow improvement over, you know, however many hundreds of thousands of years or whatever.
But then there's this point where there's like a rapid improvement, right?
Yeah, it's because it's a snowballing effect.
The culture creates more culture.
And so it's kind of the...
No, no, just that point that there is an improvement, even a gradual improvement.
And then you're right.
You have the, you know, the kind of snowball effect.
But the gradual improvement, a characteristic which distinguishes our archaeological records from, you know, other primates, not other, like, homo species, because there was Tullius there as well.
But it's, yeah, it's an interesting thing.
Yeah, so, well, where I was going with that, Chris, is similar to the point that you just made, which is that...
As opposed to just being intrinsically better engineering-type thinkers.
If you drop me in the savannah without any tools, I wouldn't do very well.
Certainly no better than a chimpanzee, right?
At making tools or doing stuff with them.
I'd get splinters, it would be terrible.
But then, you know, so the other aspect to it, which is getting more attention, of course, is this innate propensity for language.
Alright, so language is super important.
Communication is super helpful in propagating culture as well, and that was another big theme that has been interesting.
But I think this study just added a new shade of that to me, because it's not language, right?
It's actually something a bit more fundamental to that, which is copying and imitation, which helps the transmission and the gradual improvement, which eventually becomes exponential, It's interesting to think about the human species like this because we're smart,
don't get me wrong.
We're smarter than chimpanzees on an individual basis.
But our progress, or whatever you want to describe it, the civilization is mainly attributable to all of that progressive cultural acquisition.
That's why you need anthropologists, Mark.
Good ones.
Good ones.
So, yeah.
Well, look, I'm glad my paper was so well received and we will return to do another one.
Is it your turn or my turn?
It's your turn.
It's my turn.
This was your paper, so it's my turn.
I can't remember if we backlogged, like, you know, a bunch.
So, no.
Your turn.
A chimpanzee would have been able to work better.
So, top this, Matt.
Top it.
You like?
Tough it.
Alright, alright.
I'm going to get something that's going to blow your mind.
It'll be like...
Yeah.
You'll be seeing connections and making speculations.
Let's see.
Let's see.
Well, look, it's exactly an R, so I'm going to stop it now.
