Boxed

A TV program made me think a bit yesterday. Probably a mistake, but I will try and explain. It was a program comparing great ape and human intelligence. This box puzzle was one of the instances where we come out with some interesting results. A puzzle box like this, but with opaque walls is presented to a chimpanzee. An adult woman acquaintance of the chimp demonstrates a ritual of unnecessary actions before opening the little red fronted drawer to get a sweet, the chimpanzee carefully follows the actions and gets the sweet. The same experiment is performed for a child who also follows the ritual to get the sweet. Then this transparent box with exactly the same structure is brought out by the same woman to observe the behavior of the relevent primates. Here the chimpanzee pulls out the drawer and gets the sweet as it can see there is nothing to stop it doing that. The child can see that too, but it follows all the ritual actions and then opens the drawer to get the sweet. Apparently this behavior is called overimitation.
It seemed to me to have interesting implications for the perpetuation of a lot of ritual behavior in society. I think it might be interesting to try the experiment a little like that game where a whispered message is passed along a chain of people to be found utterly changed at the end. In the experiment the relationship of adult and child seems to be a big factor, if a chain of children were subsequently to demonstrate the ritual to each other in separate interactions I wonder how far down the chain the ritual would survive. It would also be interesting to see if the use of words might cause increased longevity.
Here is a site that has more pictures and whatnot describing the thing more fully. For a more in depth and less bite sized version with some weird long words, a few equations and no chimpanzees go here.
It is interesting to speculate on how these irrelevant rituals we all pick up effect us subconsciously, somewhere in our heads we must be having a bit of a giggle as we do this unnecessary stuff and also making a lot of snide comments on internal memos about the people who "taught" it to us. There is certainly a morbid fascination to these type of experiments that reveal something of the pattern that governs our acquisition of behavior. I suppose it would be a little simplistic to call it a program that governs us, but if we take that as an analogy this would seem to be a subroutine that needs some work.