Do you like it when someone copies you? They do after all say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! Yet we only take that so far; there is a universal rejection of people copying the work, or even style, of others. Is it really universal though, and at what age does a rejection of copying set in? This is exactly what some researchers set out to discover.
To get a cross cultural look at how children feel about copying, researchers gathered groups of three to six year-olds from the United States, China, and Mexico. The children all watched videos that used their native language; English, Mandarin, or Spanish. Regardless of the language though, the content was identical.
The children were shown three videos. At the beginning of each video a puppet was shown peeking at another puppet doing a drawing. One video showed the peeking-puppet creating an identical drawing. A second video showed the peeking-puppet creating a similar drawing with the same theme but different elements. The third video showed the peeking-puppet drawing a completely different picture.
The children were asked to rate how good or bad the puppets were.
All of the five and six year olds across all three cultures rated the puppet who copied as bad. So it seems that by this age there is a cross-cultural rejection of copying. For three and four year olds however, it wasn’t so clear cut. Mexican three and four year olds were more positive about puppets who did unique drawing but the American and Chinese three and four year olds did not distinguish between copiers and unique drawers.
This might reflect the need for three and four year olds to copy in order to learn but certainly by age five and six all people get that copying is stealing, even if you can’t really see what has been stolen; that will be calming news for intellectual property rights lawyers everywhere.
