Sylvia’s recipe: The role of imitation and pedagogy in the transmission of cultural knowledge

Historically, imitation has frequently been proposed as the central mechanism mediating the reproduction, spread, intergenerational transmission and stabilization of human cultural forms, population-specific behavioral traditions found in groups of non-human primates, or both (Baldwin 1894; Bandura 1986; Blackmore 2000; Byrne and Russon 1998; Dawkins 1976; Dennett 1995; Donald 1991; Meltzoff 1996; Tomasello, Kruger, and Rutner 1993; Tomasello 1999; Whiten 2000; Whiten and Custance 1996). In this paper we provide a critical reappraisal of the dominant role classically attributed to imitation in cultural reproduction. We argue that the properties of alternative social learning mechanisms (such as emulation or imitation) reflect the specific demand characteristics that different kinds of cultural products impose on their cultural transmission process to ensure their reproducibility. We distinguish between cultural forms whose functionally relevant aspects are cognitively ‘transparent’ versus ‘opaque’ for the observational learner and discuss the inherent relation between these properties on the one hand, and emulation versus imitation on the other. We argue how the emergence of different cultural environments with predominantly cognitively transparent versus opaque cultural forms may have led to the selection and specialization of suitable alternative social transmission mechanisms.