Do Children Infer Expertise from Others’ Acts of Imitation?

In everyday life, popular people’s fashion decisions drive fashion trends, leaders inspire collective action, and experts guide decisions broadly. That is, people often imitate those with expertise. In three experiments (N = 249), we investigated whether 4- to 7-year-old children view imitation as a signal of expertise. Specifically, we presented children with interactions in which one agent was imitated and another agent was not imitated, and we investigated whether children selectively learn from the imitated agent. Across experiments, we varied whether the agents were animated shapes, cartoon humans, or real humans. When the agents were animated shapes or cartoon humans, there was either weak evidence or no evidence that children selectively learned from the imitated agent. By contrast, when the agents were real humans, children selectively learned from the imitated agent. These findings support the possibility that, when children observe acts of imitation in person, they make inferences about who has social influence and expertise, and these inferences guide children’s decisions about whom to learn from.