No evidence for the age-based imitation bias in a culturally diverse sample

Humans possess learning biases that guide them to imitate individuals likely to hold adaptive information. One proposed bias—the age-based imitation bias—suggests that children preferentially imitate adults over peers because adults are presumed to have greater instrumental and conventional competence. Although supported by studies with young children from the post-industrialized west, this bias has not been examined across broader developmental ranges or diverse cultural contexts. Therefore, here we investigated adult versus peer imitation in 369 children aged 3–17 years from four communities: Congolese BaYaka, Congolese Bandongo, Scots, and Chinese Americans. Across instrumental and conventional tasks, we found no evidence that children preferentially imitated adults over peers. These null findings may reflect an existing publication bias in the social learning literature. They also raise the possibility that reported age-based effects may have been activated by the presence of other state- and model-based biases embedded within previous experiments.