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Social learning and imitation

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by Neal E. Miller and John Dollard.

4 factors are essential to learning: drives, cues, responses, and rewards. Social motivations which are secondary drives include imitativeness, a process by which matched acts are evoked in two people and connected to appropriate cues. "In matched-dependent behavior, the leader is able to read the relevant environmental cue, but the follower is not; the latter must depend upon the leader for the signal as to what act is to be performed and where and when." In copying behavior "the copier must slowly bring his response to approximate that of a model and must know, when he has done so, that his act is an acceptable reproduction of the model act." The authors present not only a theoretical analysis of these problems but also experiments on rats and children where the problem has been to teach the subject to imitate. There is a discussion of crowd behavior, an analysis of a case of lynching, and a discussion of the diffusion of culture. Appendices present a revision of Holt's theory of imitation and a historical review of the general topic. "Our position is that if there are any innate connections between stimuli and responses of the initiative type, they are few and isolated." "In summary, imitation can greatly hasten the process of independent learning by enabling the subject to perform the first correct response sooner than he otherwise would… . In order for imitation to elicit the first correct response, the essential units of copying or matched-dependent behavior must already have been learned." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

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Availability

Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

301.1 NEA s

Publisher

United States of America : Pub. for the Institute of human relations by Yale university press., 1941

Collation

xiv, 341 hlm. illus., diagrs. 24 cm.

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

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Classification

301.1

Content Type

text

Media Type

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Carrier Type

-

Edition

First edition.

Subject(s)

Learning, Psychology of
Imitation
Social psychology

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

Neal Elgar, John Dollard

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