Intelligent and slavish imitation

"Imitation" is often associated as a bad thing as a whole. However, as James Surowiecki once stated in his book, The Wisdom of Crowds (which you should run to libraries/bookstores to get if you love business and sociology), there are two forms of imitation: intelligent imitation and slavish imitation. The difference between the two, as may easily have been guessed, is that slavish imitation refers to blindly imitating something/someone, while intelligent imitation is imitating with a basis. Say for example some random stranger tells you that Barack Obama is a horrible election choice without giving reason. Imitating such a person would be slavish imitation at it's purest form. However, say you follow the aggregated opinion of many politically-aware people who share your values and beliefs, and who follow a similar lifestyle to yours. Imitating such people's political decisions would be a much more intelligent form of imitation than the one in the former example.

There's the argument that any kind of imitation is for the weak and for those who can't quite think for themselves. However, if this were true, you'd have to consider yourself weak and dependent. The reason why I'm saying this is because everyone makes decisions based on the opinions of those that they don't know. Take this in for example: you're looking for a good movie to watch on a Friday night. However, you see that http://www.movies.com/ or Ebert and Roeper gave the movie that you wanted to watch a D rating. So, do you waste your time on a relatively bad investment? No. This is an example of intelligent imitation.

Now, for a good example of slavish imitation. Imagine you're living in a far East Asian country and own a rice farm, and your neighbours own rice farms. The place that you're imagining here has differing soils, so when your neighbour has a successful crop-growing strategy, would you follow along with it? No, because you don't know if it will work for you. In fact, there'd probably be a strong possibility that it wouldn't work for you because the soil types between you and your neighbours differ so much. If you did follow what your rice-farming neighbours did without at least leaving a testing area to see if it would really work for you, that would be really slavish.

What keys into whether a person will imitate another is the degree of importance of the decision at hand. With the movie-going example, it's not really going to kill you to not rent the movie that you, at first, wanted to see. But if you're a rice farmer, and rice farming is your source of income, you want to be 100% sure that it will work for you, and you will probably not want to imitate, for the sake of your life and your possible children's lives. What I've basically hinted at here was that, the more important the decision, the less likely a person will imitate.