Causality illusion vs. rational imitation

[kaht]

Hi

I'm a psych student trying to figure out overimitation, so I'm pleased to have come across your great site!

I'm wondering how your causality illusion hypothesis differs from the possible explanation for overimitation that you describe in point 3 on the possible explanations section? Isn't inferring causality the same as crediting someone with rational intent? I believe point 3 is along the lines of 'rational imitation', which was investigated by Gergely et al. (2002). Accordingly, you copied your MIT peer's actions with the computer programming because you credited him with means-end behaviour and had no reason to believe it was not rational.

However, imagine you had found out that one of the steps he used to debug the system was actually highly inefficient and could be by-passed, but that he performed this step only to avoid his temperamental computer from crashing. Say, for example, that this program did not run as efficiently in the particular operating system loaded on his PC, but would work much better on the one loaded on your PC. Then, presumably, you would only perform that unneccessary step if you were using his computer, or one running the same operating system as his, and not when you were using your own?

It's not clear to me how the causality illusion hypothesis goes beyond the rational imitation explanation. In Meltzoff (1988) and Gergely et al's (2002) research, children overimitated turning on a light with a head touch instead of their hands. The children credited the adults with, albeit opaque, rational intentions in performing novel actions towards achieving the goal of turning on the light. Isn't this the same thing as children automatically encoding causality in actions? If you had given your participants rational reasons for the unnecessary acts you performed, as was subsequently done in Gergely et al's work, wouldn't they similarly cease to overimitate?