Rewards and uncritical learning

This experiment shows that a human child adopts a pointless procedure that an ape of the same age dismisses. The wrong conclusion to draw from this is that human babies are stupider than ape babies. The insight is that humans have adapted to pay attention to processes that yield rewards, especially when those processes are engaged in by superiors. Not all processes that are followed by rewards are worth repeating however. Undoubtedly we all pointlessly bang some boxes at some point in our everyday lives, simply because our parents banged those same boxes and it worked for them. Unless we test our theories we can waste a lot of time and energy.