Adaptive Value

Social Affiliation

Social Affiliation

Imitation allows for social adhesion in groups. The adaptive value of imitation in humans is believed to be the facilitation of group living.   Imitating others and matching behaviors increases tolerance, social affiliation, and decreases aggressive acts (Paukner, 2009).  It has been shown in humans that imitation is an unintentional subconscious act, yet individuals who were mimicked by another individual are more likely to help or act kindly to the individual who mimicked them.  Imitation is adaptively useful for increased altruism and “prosocial orientation”, allowing for the strengthening of social bonds.  Imitating an individual leads to that individual acting prosocially towards you, which could lead to help collecting food or raising children.  This behavior is therefore very beneficial because it can increase your lifetime reproductive success (van Baaren, 2004).

Capuchin Monkey experiment:

Research has been done in capuchin monkeys to study if imitation has a similar adaptive value in nonhuman primates. An experiment was conducted with capuchin monkeys and human imitators.  The monkeys were given a small plastic ball to play with while two human experimenters looked on.  One of the experimenters imitated the monkeys’ actions while the other did not.  The researchers looked at the amount of time that the monkey spent looking at each of the experimenters as a measure of social affiliation. As seen in the figure, the monkeys were shown to increase social affiliation with humans who imitated them compared to those who did not (Paukner, 2009)


capuchin imitate

Figure 1.  Shows increased social connection of the monkey to experimenters who imitated the capuchin monkey. The bar height shows the average time the monkey spent looking at the experimenters while playing with a ball as a measure of social affiliation across 5 trials.  Dark bars correlate to an experimenter who imitated the monkeys’ actions while white bars correlate to the experimenter who did not imitate the monkeys’ actions. * = difference with p=0.05, ** = significant difference with p<0.05, two-tailed t-tests (Exp. 1&3: N=11, Exp. 2, 4 & 5: N=10, see (14)). Error bars represent SEM. (Paukner, 2009)


Why Imitation is Necessary:

Imitation is the “social glue” that connects individuals and holds group living together (Paukner, 2009).  It promotes association and altruism while decreasing the rate of aggression between individuals.  Group living is important in primates because it allows cooperative food collection and protection from predators.  The behavior of imitation helps increase an individuals’ lifetime reproductive success by making group living work, and by increasing prosocial behaviors (van Baaren, 2004).