The perpetuation of ritualistic actions as revealed by young children's transmission of normative behavior

Children will comprehensively copy others' actions despite manifest perceptual cues to their causal ineffectiveness. In experiment 1 we demonstrate that children will overimitate in this way even when the arbitrary actions copied are used as part of a process to achieve an outcome for someone else. We subsequently show in experiment 2 that children will omit arbitrary actions, but only if the actions are to achieve a clear, functional goal for a naïve adult. These findings highlight how readily children adopt what appear to be conventional behaviors, even when faced with a clear demonstration of their negligible functional value. We show how a child's strong, early-emerging propensity for overimitation reveals a sensitivity for ritualistic behavior

The malleability of personality traits in adolescence

Models of economic decision-making usually assume that personality is stable over time. We assess the validity of this assumption in adolescence and young adulthood using nationally representative panel data from Australia. Our study shows that mean changes in personality traits are moderate because most individuals do not change their scores in a statistically reliable way during adolescence and young adulthood, or changes occur in equal proportions in opposite directions. The largest changes over an eight-year window are found for conscientiousness. Its average increase implies a 7% rise in the probability of obtaining a university degree – equivalent to a $7,800 net increase in lifetime earnings. Youth also reduce on average their external locus-of-control and extraversion, and increase their agreeableness and emotional stability. Important gender differences emerge for changes in openness to experience with increases in this trait over time for males and decreases for females. Moreover, an examination of the extent to which personality responds to personal or environmental shocks indicates that intra-individual trait changes are not systematically predicted by one-off life events. However, the experience of repeated health problems increases external control perceptions and reduces agreeableness – altering the normal maturation process of the two traits; we demonstrate that the size of this effect is economically meaningful

Exploring the role of parental engagement in non-cognitive skill development over the lifecourse

We examine the role that parental engagement with child’s education plays in the lifecourse dynamics of locus of control (LOC), one of the most widely studied non-cognitive skills related to economic decision-making. We focus on parental engagement as previous studies have shown that it is malleable, easy to measure, and often available for fathers, whose inputs are notably understudied in the received literature. We estimate a standard skill production function using rich British cohort data. Parental engagement is measured with information provided at age 10 by the teacher on whether the father or the mother is very interested in the child’s education. We deal with the potential endogeneity in parental engagement by employing an added-value model, using lagged measures of LOC as a proxy for innate endowments and unmeasured inputs. We find that fathers’, but not mothers’, engagement leads to internality, a belief associated with positive lifetime outcomes, in both young adulthood and middle age for female and socioeconomically disadvantaged cohort members. Fathers’ engagement also increases the probability of lifelong internality and fully protects against lifelong externality. Our findings highlight that fathers play a pivotal role in the skill production process over the lifecourse

The stability of personality traits in adolescence and young adulthood

Models of economic decision-making usually assume that personality is stable over time. We assess the validity of this assumption over an eight-year time frame in adolescence and young adulthood using nationally representative panel data from Australia. Our study shows that unconditional mean-level changes in personality traits are small—with the exception of conscientiousness which increases by 0.38 SD—because most individuals do not change their scores in a statistically reliable way during adolescence and young adulthood, or changes occur in equal proportions in opposite directions. Controlling for systematic panel attrition and multiple hypothesis testing, we demonstrate that personality traits do not systematically respond to the majority of common one-off family-, income-, and health-related shocks. However, a small number of life events—marriage, family members detained in jail, leaving the workforce and long-term health problems—are associated with subsequent changes in personality. In particular, youth who experience long-term health problems including bodily pain increase their external locus of control by 0.5–0.9 SD, an economically meaningful change when expressed in terms of hourly wage penalty

Do children overimitate in a helping context? Exploring how response conditions influence the reproduction of unnecessary goal-direct actions

Children will reliably reproduce an entire sequence of goal-directed actions modelled to them, even those that are not functionally necessary to achieving the outcome at hand. This is termed overimitation. It is widely believed that this behavioural pattern mediates the reproduction and transmission of cultural knowledge; however, debate surrounds its underlying mechanism. The natural pedagogy hypothesis suggests that overimitation is elicited through engagement in an ostensive, pedagogical framework. However, because most overimitation studies are conducted within this context, we have little understanding of how children behave when they are required to respond in absence of pedagogical demands. This study manipulated the context surrounding children’s opportunity to make an imitative response. Here, 40 four-year-old children were shown an ostensively communicated sequence of actions that incorporated both causally-related and arbitrary actions. One group of children responded whilst engaged in a standard pedagogical context, and two groups responded whilst engaged in helping a naïve adult (one in the presence of the model, and the other in her absence). Children imitated the unnecessary sequence of actions with high fidelity across both response contexts, suggesting that children’s overimitation behaviour is not constrained to response contexts in which they experience pedagogical demand. Additionally, children in the helping context were more likely to transfer arbitrary actions to a naïve adult compared to causally-related actions. Thus, when engaged in helping a naïve adult, it appears that children place as much emphasis upon performing the ‘ritualistic’ process of achieving the outcome, as they do on achieving the outcome itself