Do Adults Overimitate?

[ArizonaMom]

Hi all,

First I want to say that I think this site is such a neat idea! I'd love to have a place like this to discuss parenting with others, so I hope people won't be too shy about posting. On that note I decided to try and lead by example.

Last night I was telling my husband about how kids overimitate and he asked a question that I thought I'd pass along. His question was, "what about adults?" It got me thinking about my elderly mother, who I have recently been trying to introduce email and the internet to. She's happily using her Gmail now, but the other day I noticed her doing something funny. Before she starts her browser, she goes around making sure that all the other windows on the desktop are closed. I asked her about it and she said she thought you had to do it that way! I realized that in times when I've been showing her how to use the computer, I often start by closing other open windows just to reduce clutter. Here I thought I was helping her by reducing the amount of stuff to look at, and now she's "overimitating" me!

I just thought that was a funny example of how adults can overimitate too sometimes. I wonder if other people have similar experience? Do we ever really grow out of looking a bit too much to others for knowledge?

I look forward to meeting more of you!

Susan.

[derek]

Hi Susan,

Welcome! Thanks for your kind words on the site -- I'm really pleased that you like it. And thanks too for helping get things going with your own post!

You raise a really excellent point. Personally, I think that adults commit overimitation-style errors all the time -- they're just a bit less obvious because the situations in which we commit them have greater surface complexity than the simple Puzzle Objects that we tested kids with. I totally agree with you that computers are really the paradigmatic example of this kind of thing. In fact, inspired by your comment this morning, I just wrote a blog post on this very thing.

You can read it right here:
http://www.hellofelix.com/blog/2007/12/07/adults-dont-have-last-laugh-on-overimitation/

I talked about your excellent browser example, and added one or two of my own to boot.

What do other people think? Are these kinds of examples of adults copying actions without really understanding why comparable to the kinds of overimitation than kids do? Better yet: what are some examples of times that you been guilty of overimitating?

Looking forward to reading more!

Derek