Synonyms
Definition
The acquisition of new skills or behaviors through individual effort or by replicating the actions of others.
Introduction
Imagine you have accidently stumbled across Marty McFly’s DeLorean (for the uninitiated, this is in reference to the film Back to the Future), and not knowing how to operate it properly, find yourself transported back over a million years to the African savannah. There you encounter a group of Homo erectuswho are strangely unperturbed by your presence (and, more strangely, unperturbed by the presence of the DeLorean). You eventually notice that most members of the group are able to manufacture stone hand axes and, being ignorant of how to get the DeLorean to return you to the present, quickly realize that to survive you must learn how to build your own stone tools. The key question is how do you begin doing so? Perhaps you would start by bashing two rocks together....
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References
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Nielsen, M. (2016). Learning vs. Imitation. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2383-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2383-1
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