Imagine watching someone open a transparent box. Before sliding the latch and retrieving the object inside, they tap the lid twice with a wooden stick. You can see that the tapping moves no part of the mechanism, yet you may still copy it exactly. Psychologists call this tendency to reproduce visibly irrelevant actions “overimitation”.
In a 2007 experiment, Lyons, Young and Keil found that children who watched an adult intentionally manipulate a novel object tended to encode all of the demonstrated actions as causally meaningful. Copying persisted even when the object was transparent and the unnecessary action appeared avoidable. Later research has found related behaviour in adults, although its strength changes with the model, instructions, object transparency and social context.
One explanation is causal caution. Learners know they may have misunderstood the device, so retaining an extra step can be safer than deleting a crucial one. Another explanation is normative: a demonstrator may be showing not only how to obtain a result, but how people here are meant to perform the action. Copying can therefore reflect an inference about a hidden mechanism, a convention, a ritual or group membership. A single act may not reveal which motive dominates.
Overimitation should not be reduced to stupidity or obedience. It is a cost of social learning. Humans can inherit techniques and customs before fully understanding them, but accidental actions can travel with the useful ones. To test whether a step matters, it must be altered or removed and the outcome observed. “Everyone does it” and “I cannot see a purpose” are both insufficient evidence about causation.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0704452104
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/000712610X493115