Harriet Over

Who they are

Harriet Over is a developmental and social psychologist. She is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of York, where she leads research in the Social Origins Lab. Her university profile lists her research interests as prejudice and discrimination in children and adults, first impressions formed from appearance, dehumanisation, and social learning and social motivation. She took a PhD in developmental psychology at Cardiff University, completed in 2009. At the time of the 2009 study she was affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and with Cardiff University.

Key papers

Over, H., & Carpenter, M. (2009), Priming third-party ostracism increases affiliative imitation in children, Developmental Science, 12(3), F1-F8. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00820.x The children who saw the exclusion video went on to imitate a model's actions more closely than children who saw a control video.

Over, H., & Carpenter, M. (2013), The social side of imitation, Child Development Perspectives, 7(1), 6-11. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12006 A review arguing that children's imitation is often driven by the wish to belong to a group and to bond with others, and not only by the wish to learn.

Key ideas

Children are sensitive to social exclusion, even when they only witness it, and respond by imitating more closely.

The authors reasoned that a strong need to belong might make indirect exclusion meaningful.

Imitation is social as well as practical: children often copy to affiliate, which helps explain why they sometimes copy every step of a demonstration, including steps that serve no purpose.

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