Babies know you suck.
http://www.livescien...ky-imitate.html
"Babies are famous for copying adults, but a new study shows that little ones carefully choose whether to imitate an adult's actions based on how credible they think the adult is.
"Researchers divided 60 babies between 13 months and 16 months into two groups. In the first group, "unreliable" experimenters looked inside a container while expressing excitement, and invited the babies to discover whether the box contained a toy or was empty. For that group's experiment, the box was empty. The second group had "reliable" experimenters, so when the babies copied the adults' enthusiastic behavior and looked inside the box, they found a toy.
In a second imitation task, each baby again observed the same experimenter that they had looked at during the box exercise. This time, the adult used her forehead instead of her hands to turn on a push-on light. The experimenter then watched to see whether the infant would copy her behavior.
"The results showed that 61 percent of the infants in the "reliable" group imitated the irrational behavior of using their foreheads to turn on the light. By contrast, 34 percent of infants imitated the unreliable testers who had previously deceived them during the box task.
"Like older children, infants keep track of an individual's history of being accurate or inaccurate and use this information to guide their subsequent learning," said study researcher Diane Poulin-Dubois, a professor in the Concordia Department of Psychology and member of the university's Centre for Research in HumanDevelopment. "Specifically, infants choose not to learn from someone who they perceive as unreliable."
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