The decisions are comparatively simple, the possibilities for learning and imitation are unusually large, the compensation for coaches who make the decisions is extremely high, and the market for their services is intensely competitive. Despite these forces, the standard assumption that agents maximize simple objective functions fails to lead to reasonably accurate descriptions of behavior.

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.

Productivity is going to be a critical issue. And it's not just about getting more time for professors in the classroom. It involves reexamining the learning experience and restructuring faculty and the use of faculty time.

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.

That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything – from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

Thus previous work provides little evidence about the strength of force pushing decision-makers toward conservatism. The results of this paper suggest that the forces may be shockingly strong.