Connecting with other minds:
Copying, conformity and culture
Andrew Whiten
University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK
Social learning, traditions and culture have become highly active research topics for both humans and non-human species through the last two decades. These topics have also been very controversial. For primates, always prominent in such work, this period began with critiques of earlier studies, expressing skepticism about the imitative and cultural capacities of monkeys and apes. More recent studies have answered these critiques with evidence of considerable copying fidelity in both monkeys and apes. Our studies employing ‘diffusion’ experiments have now demonstrated this in repeated episodes of cultural transmission, implying a more human-like copying capacity than hitherto recognized. Some evidence suggests that this fidelity may extend to conformity, a well-established human tendency to be like others just because that is the local social norm. This phenomenon may be linked to others highlighted in this workshop, notably empathy, theory of mind and the function of mirror neurons. Accordingly the rising number of reports of conformity in animal social learning here justifies a review of the relevant studies, which reveals several different forms that ‘conformity’ may take. The results of these experiments with captive primates have been complemented by a parallel series of field studies documenting the observational evidence for richer cultural variation among primates in the wild, than had been contemplated earlier. These studies are here also briefly reviewed. Although in general this body of work portrays some primates as remarkably more human-like in social learning than appreciated before, other studies have underlined differences between monkeys, apes and humans. Our own experimental work has highlighted two distinct features of human social learning. One concerns cumulative cultural evolution, where our recent experiments have begun to chart the constraints apes are under. A second concerns our evidence for ‘over-imitation’ in children, a possibly crucial factor in humans’ earliest acquisition of cultural information.