How Not to Find Over-imitation in Animals

Human culture is seen as more cumulative, cooperative, and normative, in contrast to animal cultures. One hypothesis to explain these differences is the over-imitation hypothesis—that the differences between human culture and animal cultures can be traced to the human unique tendency to over-imitate. In this paper we analyze the current state of the literature on animal over-imitation and challenge the adequacy of the over-imitation hypothesis. To make this argument, we first argue that the function of human over-imitation is norm-learning. Then we review the empirical evidence against animal over-imitation and argue that these studies do not take into account relevant variables given the normative nature of over-imitation. We then analyze positive empirical evidence of over-imitation in great apes and canids and conclude they may have some capacity for over-imitation. In addition to the methodological suggestion for how to study animal over-imitation, a theoretical suggestion is that over-imitation might be much more widely found among species. The larger implication is that if we do find widespread evidence of over-imitation across species, many of the current theories of human uniqueness that focus on human hyper-cooperation or social norms may have only identified a difference of degree between humans and other animals.