Experimental Study of Associative Processes 83 
did go out. Hedid not follow the other but went 20 seconds 
later. It depends upon one’s general opinion whether one 
shall attribute this one case out of three to accident or 
imitation.~ 
I also took two chicks, one of whom learned to escape 
from A (in Fig. 19) by going to B and jumping down the 
side to the right of A, the other of whom learned to jump 
down the side to the /eft, and placed them together upon A. 
Each took his own course uninfluenced by the other in 10 trials- 
Chicks were also tried in several pens where there was only 
one possible way of escape to see if they would learn it more 
quickly when another chick did the thing several times before. 
their eyes. The method was to give some chicks their first 
trial with an imitation possibility and their second without, 
while others were given their first trial without and their. 
second with. If the ratio of the average time of the first 
-trial to the average time of the second is smaller in the first 
class than it is in the second class, we may find evidence of 
this sort of influence by imitation.:. Though imitation may 
not be able to make an animal do what he would otherwise 
not do, it may make him do ‘ial a thing he would have 
done sooner or later any way.| As a fact the ratio is much 
larger. This is due to the fact that a chick, when in a pen 
with another chick, is not afflicted by the discomfort of lone- 
liness, and so does not try so hard to get out. So the other 
chick, who is continually being put in with him to teach 
him the way out, really prolongs his stay in. This factor 
destroys the value of these quantitative experiments, and | 
I do not insist upon them as evidence against imitation, 
though they certainly offer none for it. I do not give 
descriptions of the apparatus used in these experiments or a 
detailed enumeration of the results, because in this dis- 
cussion we are not dealing primarily with imitation as a- 
