SHORT REPORT Preschool children favor copying a successful individual over an unsuccessful group Matti Wilks, 1 Emma Collier-Baker 1 and Mark Nielsen 1, 2 1. Early Cognitive Development Centre, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Australia 2. School of Applied Human Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Abstract The human aptitude for imitation and social learning underpins our advanced cultural practices. While social learning is a valuable evolutionary survival strategy, blind copying does not necessarily facilitate survival. Copying from the majorityallows individuals to make rapid judgments on the value of a trait, based on its frequency. This is known as the majority bias: an individual’s tendency to copy the behavior elicited by the largest number of individuals in a population. An alternative approach is to follow those who are the most proficient. While there is evidence that children do show both processes, no study has directly pitted them against each other. To do this, in the current experiment 36 children aged between 4 and 5 years watched liveactors demonstrate, as a group or individually, how to open novel puzzle boxes. Children exhibited a bias to the majority when group and individual methods were successful, but favored the individual if the group method was unsuccessful. Affiliating children with the unsuccessful majority group did not impact on this pattern. Research highlights • A growing literature has documented young chil- dren’s selective social learning behavior. The current research adds to this, showing that young children preferentially copy the actions used by a successful individual over those employed by an unsuccessful group, even if the group comprises individuals the child has been affiliated with. • The majority of past investigations into the majority bias have used video to present stimuli. Here, amplifying ecological validity, we relied on live actors. • The findings of this study highlight the role of imitation in enabling children to acquire new skills and suggest that when confronted with options of what to copy, actions leading to a functional outcome are prioritized over those that are ultimately unsuc- cessful – even if they might afford options for group affiliation. This establishes for the first time, and in contrast to previous studies, that the proficiency bias can trump the majority bias. • The current study demonstrates that there are boundaries to the extent that the children will follow group behavior – and, adaptively, these boundaries are partly set by their utility in bringing about desirable outcomes. Introduction A hundred years ago televisions were fantasy, recorded music was heard on clunky gramophones, film taken using brick-sized cameras required special labs to pro- cess, and phone calls were directed through manually operated switchboards. And there was certainly no way for any of these items to be paired. Now contemporary smart phones enable us to access all of these functions and more in one pocket-sized device. By any reckoning, the technological advances taking us from a living room full of mechanical furniture to a highly portable artifact that can have two people interact in real-time video, continents apart, is remarkable. Such advances are an outcome of our species’ remarkable capacity for what is Address for correspondence: Mark Nielsen, School of Psychology, Universityof Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia; e-mail: nielsen@psy.uq. edu.au © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Developmental Science (2014), pp 1–11 DOI: 10.1111/desc.12274