December 7, 2007 @ 2:10 pm
When it Comes to Overimitation, Adults Don’t Have the Last Laugh
This post was inspired by a really great question that a blog reader named Susan posted on the Felix Forum this morning. She pointed out that though it’s easy to talk about overimitation as a humorous quirk of children’s learning, it’s not really clear that we as adults are immune to the same kinds of errors. I couldn’t agree more: when it comes to the seemingly “obvious” mistakes that overimitation can introduce, adults definitely don’t have the last laugh.
It’s funny (if not altogether shocking), but the anecdotal evidence on this point seems to come primarily from situations in which adults are interacting with computers. Actually, there was a blog post to exactly this effect just a day or two ago from an IT professional named Anders Aspnas in Finland. On his Efficiency Limit blog, Aspnas comments that:
“I guess [overimitation] occurs a lot in IT… Part of what is done has no real relevance to the problem at hand. The procedures just happen that way as a result of accidents being replicated… just because someone happened to originally do it that way. Somebody may finally realize that some parts of procedures are not bringing any value and improve, but that seems to take ages.”
My own experience definitely mirrors what Aspnas is pointing out. In the process of converting my parents to using Macs, for example, I’ve had many instances of noticing odd idiosyncracies in the procedures that they’ve learned, many of which turn out to be attributable to some incidental thing that I did in the process of demonstrating for them. Blog reader Susan makes a similar comment here, about how her mother “overimitated” the ritual of closing all the windows open on the desktop before launching a web browser. Having seen Susan herself do it, she was convinced that Firefox just couldn’t get off the ground any other way.
In all honesty though, this phenomenon really isn’t limited to novice users. I may have degrees in computer science and AI from Oxford and MIT, but I’ve definitely still done my fair share of computer-related overimitation. On the left is an example screen capture taken from some of the development tools we used at MIT. Click on the thumbnail for a larger view, then look at the last checkbox down toward the bottom – the one that says “invoke real build tools instead of faking them.”
What on earth does that mean? I haven’t the faintest idea.
I can tell you though that if I’d seen a more senior and experienced team member check that box in the course of debugging a project, forever after I’d have made certain that it was checked whenever I had to troubleshoot something myself. I did this kind of “overimitating” constantly at MIT, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish nearly as much while I was there if I hadn’t. Using other’s knowledge as a catalyst for your own learning (even when we don’t fully understand the details) isn’t just a good strategy, in my opinion -it’s an important aspect of human nature. When we need to extend our own understanding, the knowledge of others is often the first resource that we call on.
What do you think? Do examples like this count as overimitation in the same way that children inefficiently opening the Puzzle Objects does? Please do take a moment to comment! You can do so right here on the blog through the “Comments” link below, or on the new Felix Forum area of the site.
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Posted by Anders Aspnäs
December 11, 2007 @ 12:39 pm
Hi there, intriguing subject, great work, enjoy your site.
I agree that ability to imitate is an important aspect of human nature. Clearly it does not pay off to be skeptic when trying to imitate when trying to obtain others knowledge.
I also tend to think it is easy to find examples from IT and technology partly because it is a situation where adults need to engage in a learning activity as you showed with the puzzles. The level of complexity and degrees of freedom when dealing with a computer program also match that of a puzzle presented to children. There are many ways of getting result you are after, but many more ways where you will end up with an error.
I guess one of the reasons why overimitation occurs is that even though there are extra tasks being performed they don’t generally add much to the over all expense of learning how to solve the puzzle in comparison to the value of the reward. Getting things done in a way that is known to work is probably evaluated to be better than any experimental way where the outcome is uncertain.
What i find most interesting is that overimitation could explain, at least partly, why irrelevant behavior in IT spread simply by being copied and why this kind of erratic behavior does not seem to be going away.
Your research also opens up questions in regards to overimitation, ability to think in a skeptical way and learning. Who knows what we still have to learn about learning.