Love Survives the Truth
It is very hard for people to accept that broad imitative tendencies apply to themselves.
From Susan Hurley and Nick Cater's introduction to the second volume of Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science:
Social psychologist John Bargh, has emphasized elsewhere how very hard it is for people to accept that these broad imitative tendencies apply to themselves, both because they are unconscious and automatic, so that people are not aware of them, and because such external influences threaten their conception of themselves as being in conscious control of their own behavior. Participants are surprised by, and even tend to resist, the experimental findings . . . Nevertheless, it seems plausible to suppose that the power of broad imitative influences on behavior is recognized and exploited by advertising campaigns that expose viewers to traits and stereotypes. As Bargh suggests, recognizing that we are subject to such automatic and unconscious imitative influences may help us to gain control of them and to assimilate behavior patterns more selectively.
There are two reasons why being defensive about imitation strikes me as bizarre. First, it seems to me that anyone who is even barely aware of intellectual history should be unsurprised by the finding that humans are thoroughly imitative creatures. If science has done anything consistently over the last 200 to 300 years, it has been to decenter humans and their alleged exceptionality and control. The Earth is not the center of the solar system, the Milky Way is one among billions or trillions of galaxies, humans evolved just like other animals, they are manifestly irrational, and their decisions can be identified by a machine before they are even conscious of making them. After all that (and certainly much more), is it really surprising to learn that most of what you do is copy and reassemble ideas and behaviors from other people?
My second reason can be captured in part by this quote from Sam Harris, which, in keeping with the imitation theme, is by no means a new idea:
Can you still love people while viewing them as part of this vast fabric of causality? I find that there is no sacrifice to the good stuff. Things have to be situationally appropriate. I'm not constantly looking at my daughter, thinking . . . "she's just a part of the physical universe, and, wow, neurotransmitters giving rise to all this cuteness." That's not the mode I'm in, but even to think in those terms, it doesn't cancel the desire for her happiness. Love survives the truth. Love is not vulnerable to knowing how things are arising. And knowing how things are arising doesn't nullify all the distinctions, the possible differences in human experience that we care about. We still care about living good, happy, easy, positive lives. What else could we care about?
Knowing that "broad imitative tendencies" characterize you and others throughout your lives does not mean that you can't or shouldn't be proud of your ideas and achievements. Nor does it mean that you should be imitating more or your students should be imitating more. It ironically demonstrates how completely imitation rules our lives that we seem to want so desperately to read prescriptions (this must be telling us to do something) into the purely descriptive results provided by science.
