Humans have an instinct that is specific to arbitrary rituals, which we see as signaling group loyalty: Show a child how to perform some action that they haven’t seen before, and they will faithfully replicate not only the steps required to achieve the goal, but also superfluous ones. Why they do this is a puzzle, especially as other animals do not. … What if children can identify actions as causally opaque? If so, perhaps their brains see them as a cue to switch from normal reasoning to a “ritual stance” in which they interpret the behaviour of others as social signals, and go out of their way to copy them. … Children copy apparently aimless sequences of actions more faithfully than sequences that move towards an obvious goal. …
Glad I wasn't the only one who raised an eyebrow over the sentence "... as other animals do not". There is proof birds and whales have regional accents and great apes have regional nestbuilding and tool use methods.
Maybe part of why autistics are overrepresented on LessWrong, although the lack of imitation "is also not driven by superior causal reasoning, because the children with ASC also performed worse on the rationality discrimination task," which was "rat[ing] each action on a five point scale from ‘sensible’ to ‘silly’. Rationality discrimination was calculated as the difference between a child’s rating of the unnecessary action and the necessary action from the same sequence". Then again, this could have been a bad measure if autistics correctly rated the unnecessary action as sillier than the necessary one, but had low confidence in their estimates.
It is the over-imitation that is at stake here, not simple imitation.
Atheists shake hands.
Glad I wasn't the only one who raised an eyebrow over the sentence "... as other animals do not". There is proof birds and whales have regional accents and great apes have regional nestbuilding and tool use methods.
I think animals have this behavior too. Think of a parrot that mimics phrases it hears. Often none of the phrases have any goal attached to them.
Is there a difference?
This may be about learning social rituals rather than religious ones.
A nice additional data point.
Children with Autism do not Overimitate: http://download.cell.com/cu...
Maybe part of why autistics are overrepresented on LessWrong, although the lack of imitation "is also not driven by superior causal reasoning, because the children with ASC also performed worse on the rationality discrimination task," which was "rat[ing] each action on a five point scale from ‘sensible’ to ‘silly’. Rationality discrimination was calculated as the difference between a child’s rating of the unnecessary action and the necessary action from the same sequence". Then again, this could have been a bad measure if autistics correctly rated the unnecessary action as sillier than the necessary one, but had low confidence in their estimates.