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An experiment is described which investigates the effect of rehearsal delay on long-term imitation of a film model. The hypothesis tested was that a delay in the opportunity to imitate a film model would result in a reduction of imitation, ‘flitting’ and range of activities during play in the stimulus situation. One group of children played immediately after exposure to the fill, a second after a delay of one day, a third after one week. All groups returned after an interval of seven days, and again after 4–5 months. The hypotheses wore not accepted; the film influenced behaviour whatever the delay, but it was noted that the general effect of the films on activity level was less marked during the second session in the experimental situation, and increased after a few months' interval. The long-term effect of the film model was noted, and it was observed that at this time retention of the film model's behaviour was not related to imitative behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imitation, it is said, is the highest form of flattery. Students and practitioners of public opinion research should, therefore, be greatly flattered by the report that an increasing number of Congressmen are conducting and utilizing opinion polls in connection with their legislative responsibilities. But flattery, as experts in the art of persuasive communication know full well, can lead to dangerously euphoric sentiments, facile susceptibilities and perceptual distortions. Virgil's Greeks bearing gifts required no closer scrutiny in antiquity than do legislators who exploit the science and art of public opinion polling. Welcome, indeed, is the growing realization, on the part of the legislative branch of the Federal Government, of the significant role of public opinion in the development, formulation, and resolution of public issues and of the opinion survey as a fruitful instrument for the measurement and understanding of public attitudes opinions, motivations, information, and expectations.

This article reviews literature and research involved in the development of imitative learning and related concepts. Research on imitation is characterized by a lack of continuity and a lack of synthesis into a unified, comprehensive, theoretical structure. The concept has been investigated by child psychologists, social psychologists, counseling psychologists, physiological and perceptual psychologists, psychotherapists, personality theorists, learning theorists, teachers, and industrial psychologists. The potential that imitation learning holds for practical application in therapy and counseling appears to be significant. The needs for further research are numerous and pertain to almost every aspect of imitation theory. The possible application of imitation to the fields of therapy and counseling represents a potential.

This article presents the study on the growth of social learning and was divided into three main topics including social reinforcements, observational learning or imitation and the learning of aggression. The area of social reinforcement was one of the most productive areas of research during the period covered by the review. A number of alternative hypothesis have been formulated to account for the effects of social reinforcement on behavior, particularly following brief periods of social isolation. The phenomenon of imitation has been relatively neglected in psychological research. The theory which accounts for observational learning must be able to account for a form of learning in which a subject is able to reproduce the behavior of a model on the first trial without making an overt response and in the absence of reinforcement applied either to the observer or to the model. The theories, models and schema employed in the study and explanation of aggressive behavior reflect the wide diversity of interest, choices of levels and loci of analysis and the basic theoretical assumptions of the investigators.

Two individuals were given a maze in the form of a cardboard house with two paths of unequal length leading to the house. Their task was to choose the path the experimenter was not blocking in his mind and to discover the principle used by the experimenter in blocking the paths. The individual who responded first in each trial was the experimenter's pre-instructed confederate. After he and the naive subject had both responded, the experimenter indicated who was right or wrong in the trial. Various kinds of problems were used: the imitation problem where the confederate responded at random and was always called right since whatever path he named was the one that the experimenter considered unblocked; the short problem where the shorter of the two paths was always unblocked and where the confederate responded at random so that he was occasionally called wrong; the short-imitation problem where the confederate always selected the shorter path and therefore was consistently right; the alternation problem where first one path and then the other was unblocked and where the confederate responded at random, therefore being wrong occasionally; the alternation-imitation problem where the confederate alternated his choices and therefore was consistently right. Two of the problems were given to each subject. In each problem a subject was assigned a performance score equal to the number of trials before he gave a stipulated number of successive correct trials and a verbal score equal to the number of trials before he described the principle underlying the blocking of the paths. It was found that the same overt reactions occurred because of different reasons and involved diverse underlying processes. Thus, in the imitation problem subjects gave the same response as the confederate, in successive trials because (a) they wanted to be right, (b) they thought that in so doing they might discover the principle or pattern basal to his responses, or (c) they had discovered the... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to reevaluate the early, individual psychological concepts of imitation based on ethno-sociological analysis. Through this analysis, the concepts of imitation such as a learning process are reduced to a conscious social action, rejecting the early stimulus-response theory. This conceptual scheme is employed further to analyze the nature and limitations of imitative action in the process of inter-societal culture diffusion. The modifiability is discussed in the conclusion as the final problematic.

The article discusses issues related to imitations and adulteration. An inquiry has been made into the case of substitute goods which are adulterated or imitated without the knowledge of the purchaser. The terms adulteration, substitute, surrogate, imitation, artificial, synthetic and falsification have been defined to avoid misunderstanding. The five different types of reactions of genuine goods to the competition of falsified ones has been examined. Firstly, the competition may drive the genuine good out of use; secondly, it is possible that both may remain in trade side by side; thirdly, the falsified good may fail to remove the genuine and itself fade out; fourthly, the demand for both the goods may fall and finally, the demand for both the goods may rise. It is observed that the degree of substitutability of the genuine good for the falsified and vice versa and the consumer's knowledge or ignorance of the nature of both commodities determines the outcome of the competition between the genuine and falsified goods.

Investigation of the role of technological change in economic growth is made easier if we examine it at three different levels: at the level of invention, of innovation, and of imitation. We are led to this approach quite naturally through the circumstance that movement in technology has been defined as a change in the production function and that this may have any one of three different meanings. The production function, as an expression relating the quantity produced of a good (or goods) to quantities of inputs, may be used to express (1) what is technologically possible (the maximum output obtainable from any one of many sets of factors or the minimum inputs required for any level of output with any ratio between inputs), (2) what is possible with techniques that are (or have been) used in firms which are technological leaders, or (3) what is occurring in the economy as a whole. Technology, then, may change at any one or all of these different levels. The level of technological possibilities, the level of the technological leaders, and the average technology of the society may move at different rates and in different directions. Usually the interlinkings of these levels are such that movement in any one is reflected in the others. This, however, is not necessarily the case. Directionally opposed movement can occur. Schumpeter has pointed out that invention (change in technological possibilities) may occur without innovation (change in the productive methods of technological leaders) and innovation may occur without invention. Similarly, innovation may occur without imitation or even in the presence of retrogression in the rest of the society. The relationship of technological possibilities to technological leadership and of these to the average technology of the economy is a problem long neglected by economic theorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strings of nonsense syllables with noun and verb inflections were presented in grammatical and ungrammatical orders for 4- and 6-year-old children to imitate. Function words were present in half the sentences. The main result was a significant interaction among age, type of sentence (grammatical vs. ungrammatical), and functors (present vs. absent). There were more correct imitations of grammatical than of ungrammatical orders but only when functors were present. With inflection as the only cue to grammaticality, there was no difference in the imitation of grammatical and ungrammatical orders. At these ages, function words seem to be more important in establishing sentence grammaticality than noun and verb inflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2 psycholinguistic tasks, designed to assess speech imitation and speech comprehension abilities, were administered to 16 lower-class Negro children and 16 middle-class white children. The average age for the children in each group was 5 years. The study was carried out to discover whether gross environmental differences between the 2 groups would be reflected in their verbal performances. The children were tested for their control of 13 common syntactic structures. The results indicated that the middle-class white children's performance was superior to that of the lower-class Negro children, even when differences between their dialect and standard English were taken into consideration. Several possible sources of the group differences are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

64 second graders learned to attend to either E or a light panel for cues to solve a discrimination task. On a second task, either the same stimulus or the alternative stimulus provided relevant cues. A significant (P < .001)-' difference was found, in both errors and trials to criterion on Task 2, between Ss who were shifted to the alternative and those who had the same stimulus on both tasks. Also, the lights were found to he the more salient cue, being easier to learn to attend to on Task 1. Remits are discussed in terms of the role of attention in social reinforcer effectiveness, and some implications for the study of imitation are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects on film-mediated aggression of a co-observes positive, negative, or nonsanctions and his subsequent presence or absence during performance opportunities were investigated. It was found that positive and negative sanctions produced corresponding disinhibition and inhibition effects only when the experimenter remained with the children during a postexposure test of imitative performance. The results seem related to social-learning theory in that the children's expectancies for receiving various consequences appeared to determine the amount of initiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disturbed and non-disturbed boys were exposed to 1 of 2 video-recorded sequences depicting a female model who played with 4 sets of play materials. In 1 sequence the model played in an aggressive manner; in the other she played in a non-aggressive manner. A third group of non-disturbed boys saw a video recording of the toys with the model absent. The Ss then played with the toys depicted in the video recordings, Comparisons among the non-disturbed groups indicated that the model films were effective for evoking imitative behavior. Disturbed Ss imitated the non-aggressive model less than non-disturbed Ss, but the samples did not differ in respect to imitation of aggression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is based on the hypothesis that the effect of exposure to rewarding peer models, as compared to nonrewarding models, depends on the subject's general history of reinforcement from the peer group. 56 nursery school children were selected as Ss, and the behavior modeled consisted of a series of altruistic and "incidental" responses. It was found that Ss exposed to an altruistic peer model displayed significantly more altruism than Ss not exposed to a model. It was also discovered that Ss who had a history of frequent reinforcement from their peers imitated a rewarding model significantly more than a nonrewarding model; on the other hand, children who received infrequent reinforcement from peers imitated nonrewarding peers significantly more than rewarding peers. The results are discussed in relation to Mowrer's secondary reinforcement theory of imitative behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the imitative behavior kindergarten children in color selection. Definition of copying; Assessment of the occurrence of matched dependent imitative behavior of children; Accounts on the socialization process of children.

Assesses the learning by imitation in kindergarten children. Comparison of learning effectiveness between imitation and additional experience; Interaction between sex and treatment variables; Disadvantages of imitation.

This article analyzes social philosophy in relation to the vocabulary of sociology. While social science describes things as they are social philosophy prescribes or recommends how they ought to be ideally. The main task of social philosophy is the critical evaluation of ideas and beliefs about society. Its job is to ask whether these ideas and beliefs can be rationally justified and if they cannot, whether they can be replaced by others which are rationally justifiable. The author does not recommend any one concept of causation for sociology. Social philosophy is not competent to say what concept of causal explanation is apt for a particular purpose. What social philosophy can do is to point out that there is more than one concept of cause and that an unreflective imitation of a previously established field of science can involve unjustified assumptions.

The article discusses biases in psychology as those caused by the social circumstances. Method-ideology lays great stress on the use of the experimental method as the source of data in psychology and emphasizes the desirability of quantifying. Most psychologists know what it is to have observed a certain phenomenon and to have found it too difficult to reproduce experimentally. It is a natural consequence that experiments tend to be limited to effects that can be easily produced. The tendency is perhaps most marked in the field of personality assessment. Another example of crude theorizing in animal psychology lies in the experiments on imitation. Experimenters have had little success in bringing this about experimentally. But the special circumstances in which one might have expected it most likely to occur, when an animal is young and dependent and the model is a parent, do not seem to have been examined. Another influence might come from the way research in psychology is organized. As with any other subject, where the research has been tied to the teaching and not many students have taken the subject, psychologists have been distributed over a large number of small groups.

1. Experiments in learning and imitation lead to an expectation that attitude hypotheses based upon certain elements in learning and imitation (cue, reward, prestige, e.g.) have a chance of being fruitful. If certain elements are essential to one kind of learning, they are presumably essential to other kinds--to the learning of attitudes, for instance. 2. Positive correlations on international attitude are found often between persons and groups in which they would be anticipated according to the learning and imitation hypotheses and the frustration-aggression hypothesis employed in this study. 3. The correlations between international attitude and various persons and groups are not so high as those on certain other social attitudes (e.g., racial attitudes), however, and necessitate the assumption that cues on international matters have been relatively rare until recently at least. 4. Attitude as aggression is assumed in many theories of attitude where "radicals" are concerned. The hypothesis of attitude as negative imitation is found nowhere explicitly in the literature. 5. Studies on the relation between personality pathology and social attitude have not yet been highly successful, although "radicals" may be slightly more introverted and slightly less subject to over-socialization in the traditional taboos. Other studies, however, show no difference in adjustment, which is in general the finding of the present study. There is the interesting possibility that certain "radicals" appear less well-adjusted because they have not yet turned their radicalism to a satisfying activity while other radicals achieve good adjustment by their activism. 6. There is little evidence that persons holding unusual social attitudes differ from conservatives in personality or that "basic personality" need correlate with any particular social attitude. Although it seems possible that such a relation will be found eventually, it now appears that a wide variety of personality traits may implement the same social attitudes. This does not mean that personality will not determine the quality of an attitude, however, and the present study finds attitudes filled with the private affect of each interviewee. 7. The literature favors the present study's assumption that cues on one subject do not transfer greatly to cues on another. There is, however, the problem of explaining why attitudes appear in constellations. It is assumed that such constellations are formed in part because the prestiged cue-givers happen to hold certain attitudes in constellations themselves. 8. "Personal experience" does not appear to be closely related to international attitudes. This is in keeping with the assumption that an international attitude requires a too sophisticated perception for most persons to have made unaided. 9. The investigations of attitude made thus far tend to confirm the learning and imitation hypothesis taken by this study, although practically none of them applies learning theory systematically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the development of a performance measure of imagining ability. The measure is then related to role taking and imitating ability, measures of "imaginativeness," and self-report of imagining ability as well as other control variables. It is guided by the conviction that modeling and role taking behavior offers the best approach to examining the phenomena of imagining. It has been pointed that there exists a long history of psychological theory on imagining which takes as its point of departure the proposition that imagining can be analyzed in terms of the ability to take the role of the other. This point of view is closely related to the imitation or modeling approach to imagining which is seen as a rebuilt or imitated perception, an imitation of the object. The role taking approach on the other hand has insisted that the imitation is that of another person or of the self in another time or place and not of the object of the image. In this analysis the role taking component appears to have the largest single contribution toward the significant predictive ability.

Thirty-two groups four naive Ss and one accomplice participated in this 2 × 2 × 2 experiment designed to test conditions facilitating imitation of a competent model played by the accomplice. It was assumed that the psychological distance between the competent model and the Ss would be lessened so that imitation would increase: 1. if the model was friendly rather than hostile, 2. if the situation was non-frustrating rather than frustrating, and 3. if aggression was permitted rather titan forbidden. Imitation was measured by the Ss' reproduction of the model's two mannerisms, and was found to be significantly influenced in the predicted way by the three variables. However, the freedom to aggress did not lessen psychological distance. Alternative explanations are provided for these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research on the cognitive ability of children in learning how to write. It discusses the importance of imitational skills in understanding language and cognitive learning, specially in writing, and the acquisition of sensorimotor skills of imitation and writing and of the stimulus control of those sensorimotor skills. It concludes that imitation-writing repertoire is considered as a sensorimotor task where visual perception is used repeatedly do a task while learning to read is considered to be a cognitive task.

Explores the utility and results of pedagogy that uses imitation as its basis, particularly stylistic imitation. Three aspects of discourse that can be imitated; Imitation as enabling device; Author's focus on the expressive, rather than persuasive, aspects of rhetoric.

The article presents a study, which examines the ways in which patients in various diagnostic categories adapt themselves to social influences and expectations. In addition to diagnostic differences, it was hypothesized that social imitation and conformity to group pressure are the products of dissimilar types of processes. The study examined two situations: conformity; and social imitation, by means of four psychiatric classifications. Among normals and among different groups of institutionalized persons, it is suggested that therapeutic success is most probable when the therapist is made conversant with the procedures to elicit optimal social learning of appropriate behaviors.