Child Psychology

Social Learning and Imitation. By Neil E. Miller and John Dollard. (Yale University Press, New Haven; Oxford University Press, London, 1941. Pp. xi + 341. Price, 21 s. 6 d.)

Educational Psychology. By Charles H. Judd. (George Allen and Unwin Ltd., London, 1940. Pp. xx + 566. Price, 18 s.)

L'éducation de demain. Par J.-E. Marcault et Thérèse Brosse. (Félix Alcan, Paris, 1939. Pp. xi + 308. Price, 40 francs.)

Psycho-analysts have long been familiar with the processes which they describe as 'introjection' and 'identification'. It is clear that these processes involve at least some element of what is commonly known as imitation; but, immersed as they have been in the new and strange features of the processes they had discovered, psycho-analysts have seldom troubled themselves about the more strictly behaviouristic problem of imitation itself. Those who wish to see a more rapid rapprochement between psycho-analysis and other schools of psychology might do well, however, to consider more closely the relations of the two above-named processes to simpler forms of imitation, and in so doing they might profitably start with Miller and Dollard's new book, which appears under the auspices of the Institute of Human Relations. The authors treat imitation as a form of the wider process of social learning, and point out its great importance in the education of the individual, in the behaviour of crowds, in the transmission of culture from one generation to another, and in the diffusion of culture from one people or section of a people to another. They hold that, over this wide field, imitation, like any other form of learning, is dependent on 'reward'; in other words, that we imitate because, and in so far as, we find it pays to do so. They thus differ from those psychologists who posit an innate or instinctual tendency to imitate. They do not, it is true, consider that it is possible at present definitely to rule out the existence of such a tendency, but the evidenc