No evidence for the age-based imitation bias in a culturally diverse sample
Abstract
Humans possess learning biases that guide them to imitate individuals likely to hold adaptive information. One proposed bias—the age-based imitation bias—suggests that children preferentially imitate adults over peers because adults are presumed to have greater instrumental and conventional competence. Although supported by studies with young children from the post-industrialized west, this bias has not been examined across broader developmental ranges or diverse cultural contexts. Therefore, here we investigated adult versus peer imitation in 369 children aged 3–17 years from four communities: Congolese BaYaka, Congolese Bandongo, Scots, and Chinese Americans. Across instrumental and conventional tasks, we found no evidence that children preferentially imitated adults over peers. These null findings may reflect an existing publication bias in the social learning literature. They also raise the possibility that reported age-based effects may have been activated by the presence of other state- and model-based biases embedded within previous experiments.
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BibTeX
@misc{lewlevy2026evidence,
title = {{No evidence for the age-based imitation bias in a culturally diverse sample}},
author = {Sheina Lew-Levy and Jing Xu and Sarah Pope-Caldwell and Claire Sutherland and Francy Kiabiya Ntamboudila and Wouter van den Bos and Kathleen H. Corriveau and Natalia Bezerra Dutra and Emma Flynn and Eoin O'Sullivan},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/yxfve_v4},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/yxfve_v4/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - No evidence for the age-based imitation bias in a culturally diverse sample
AU - Sheina Lew-Levy
AU - Jing Xu
AU - Sarah Pope-Caldwell
AU - Claire Sutherland
AU - Francy Kiabiya Ntamboudila
AU - Wouter van den Bos
AU - Kathleen H. Corriveau
AU - Natalia Bezerra Dutra
AU - Emma Flynn
AU - Eoin O'Sullivan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/08
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/yxfve_v4
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/yxfve_v4/
AB - Humans possess learning biases that guide them to imitate individuals likely to hold adaptive information. One proposed bias—the age-based imitation bias—suggests that children preferentially imitate adults over peers because adults are presumed to have greater instrumental and conventional competence. Although supported by studies with young children from the post-industrialized west, this bias has not been examined across broader developmental ranges or diverse cultural contexts. Therefore, here we investigated adult versus peer imitation in 369 children aged 3–17 years from four communities: Congolese BaYaka, Congolese Bandongo, Scots, and Chinese Americans. Across instrumental and conventional tasks, we found no evidence that children preferentially imitated adults over peers. These null findings may reflect an existing publication bias in the social learning literature. They also raise the possibility that reported age-based effects may have been activated by the presence of other state- and model-based biases embedded within previous experiments.
ER -