The reason imitation spreads faster than instruction

A method spreads across an industry in months while the reasoning behind it remains confined to a few people. The two travel at different speeds because they cost different amounts to acquire. Watching what a successful competitor does and repeating it is cheap; establishing why it works requires evidence, testing and time that copying does not.

What everyone sees

Rapid diffusion is read as evidence that the practice was understood and accepted, so widespread adoption is treated as validation. Adoption measures the cost of copying and the visibility of success, not comprehension. This is why practices persist unchanged after the conditions that made them effective have gone.

What is actually happening

Boyd and Richerson modelled social learning and showed that copying others is favoured when individual investigation is costly or unreliable, so imitation is not a failure of rationality but an efficient strategy under those conditions. Rendell and colleagues ran a tournament of social learning strategies and found the winning entries relied heavily on copying rather than on individual exploration, with the timing and selectivity of copying mattering more than the amount of independent learning. Both results predict what is observed in organisations: the practice moves at the speed of observation while the explanation moves at the speed of investigation.

Why it stays hidden

The gap hides because adopters can usually supply a reason afterwards. Asked why they do it, they produce a plausible account assembled from what the practice appears to accomplish. The account was constructed after adoption, so it cannot have guided it, and it is indistinguishable in conversation from an explanation that did.