Tradition!
Fiddler On the Roof by Lev Segal in Netanya, Israel
Imitation—as the term is used in the literature—is not mindless parroting or mimicry.
A few choice quotes from the beginning of How Traditions Live and Die:
I shall try to explain how traditions get propagated in spite of the dangers of travel, and the passing of time. Doing so requires two problems to be solved: the Wear-and-Tear Problem and the Flop Problem.
The best known and best explored of the two is the Wear-and-Tear Problem. We all know it from playing Chinese Whispers (known in the United States as the game of Telephone): when a message goes through a transmission chain, it takes no more than a small number of links for mistakes to accumulate. The message suffers corruption and is eventually lost in little time, unless transmission is absolutely perfect (a condition that in reality never obtains).
'Noise,' as opposed to 'signal,' is another way of framing this problem. We saw here, for example, that even when innovation (asocial learning) was noise-free and observation (copying) was noisy, agents that relied "almost exclusively on observation outperformed the rest, and an increase in copying was strongly positively correlated with higher payoffs."
Copying outperforms innovation because the other 'agents' around you in the world tend to not enact observably unsuccessful behaviors. Thus, you are statistically more likely to land on a successful behavior by copying than by trying to discover some better way.
The Flop Problem is different. It has nothing to do with the quality of transmission. We can reproduce a gesture quite faithfully and never see it again. We can retain a sentence with near-perfect exactitude, without transmitting it to others. In those cases, the transmission chain just peters out for lack of success. The message does not even have the time to suffer wear and tear: it is a flop.
How are these two problems solved? The answer will depend on which problem is considered to be the more serious. Many authors seem to think that triumphing over the Wear-and-Tear Problem is the hard part. After that, the Flop Problem takes care of itself. Others, myself included, consider that if a tradition manages not to flop, its success all but cancels the damage of frequent transmission. Solving the Flop Problem, then, is the hard part: master it, and the Wear-and-Tear Problem will take care of itself.
The author implicitly acknowledges that both problems are important. For cultural transmission to occur, the ideas transmitted should likely be 'sticky' (one way of solving the Flop Problem), and the agents within a culture must have the capacity and inclination to store and transmit ideas with high fidelity (solving the Wear-and-Tear Problem).
In brief, the received view sees the life of traditions as being driven by faithful and compulsive transmission. They are born from imitation. Humans create long-lived traditions because they possess a capacity to imitate, with unique fidelity, what is done around them. This answer, which we will call the imitation hypothesis, is quite old. Herder theorized it. It is that of many contemporary authors. Though they would grant that our closest cousins possess some mimetic capacity, most hasten to add that cultural transmission outside our species is not faithful enough to permit more than the transmission of a handful of simple techniques. Only human imitation can take us further.
Indeed, this is the 'received' view (interesting way of putting it). On this site, I have quoted Gabriel Tarde, Tomasello, Henrich, Harris, and Dijksterhuis promoting this received view. And, at the moment at least, I endorse it as well.
I will argue that the transmission of traditions is neither particularly faithful nor especially compulsive. We lack both the desire and the capacity to imitate everything that circulates around us. Instead we transform, we customize, we reinvent, we forget, we select.
Of course we do! This is not in conflict with the so-called imitation hypothesis. Indeed, no one could seriously argue otherwise. Imitation—as it is used in this literature—is not mindless parroting or mimicry.
In my (increasingly informed) view, imitation is practically synonymous with social learning, or learning from others, and need not involve overt behavior. Remembering something that someone said to you is a form of imitation. You may have selected just that information from a conversational stream, embellished it, forgotten parts of it, and so on. But copying (imitation) serves as the foundation of the entire process.
