Charisma and Evolutionary Syntax

this evolution will not be televised

For you, dear reader, I write about charismatic persuasion because being more persuasive will make your life better.

In Robin Dunbar’s How Many Friends Does One Person Need, he talks about how other great apes learn differently than humans. If you show a chimpanzee a problem and the solution, the chimpanzee will try various solutions to the problem until it hits on one that works. (Horner & Whiten (2005) report different results with chimpanzees. YMMV: Your Monkey May Vary.) But if you show a human a problem and the solution, the human will imitate the solution.

In fact, humans tend to engage in over-imitation, “imitation of perceivably causally unnecessary actions in relation to the goal of an action sequence performed by a model.” This, Horner and Whitten did not find chimpanzees doing:

An experimenter demonstrated how to retrieve the reward with a series of actions containing both causally necessary and unnecessary actions. When the box was opaque, both chimpanzees and children ten…