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.