A desire to fit in with others is a seemingly natural part of being human. From a very young age, there is a strong motivation for children to follow conventions (e.g., Haun & Tomasello, 2011; Haun et al., 2012). Parents attend to conventional language and instruct their children to pay closer attention and to copy more precisely when conventional language is used (Clegg & Legare, 2017).

One interesting behavior that children engage in, which may result from this desire to adhere to convention, is overimitation. Horner and Whiten (2004) revealed that children would frequently slavishly copy all the actions that an adult model took to achieve a goal (such as retrieving a reward from a puzzle box), even if those actions were not causally necessary. Overimitation is common in children from cultures around the world (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010).

Research into why children overimitate suggests that they may do so because they think the model wants them to (e.g., they imitate to affiliate with the model) (Over and Carpenter, 2012). Or they may do so because they think it is the norm/ convention to do so (Clegg and Legare, 2016). Indeed, children overimitate more when conventional language (e.g., “Everyone always does it this way”) is used than when instrumental language (e.g., “I am going to…”) is used. Stengelin et al. (2022) found that overimitators are more likely to use normative language to teach a novel (non-instrumental) game to peers.

There are limits to children’s overimitation, however. For example, Keupp et al. (2016) found that children overimitate less when a causally irrelevant action is instrumentally focused or leads to the destruction of a valuable object. And children are also less likely to overimitate when they themselves act in a different context from the initial demonstration (Keupp et al., 2015). Similarly, Gergely and colleagues (2002) reported that children consider the........

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