Psychological limits on animal innovation

Innovation is a way by which animals adopt a new behaviour or apply a current behaviour to a novel situation. Although exploring a new behaviour is itself risky for the animal, a growing body of research indicates that it is fairly widespread across animal species. While there have been explorations of when innovation is most likely and which individuals are most likely to innovate, less has been explored about the psychological mechanisms underlying innovation. Here we consider some psychological limits on innovation. We focus on five factors that my limit the invention of novel behaviours (neophobia, conservatism, conformity, functional fixedness and the endowment effect). The feature common to each of these is that individuals tend to stick with existing behaviours, or the existing uses of those behaviours, rather than exploring novel options. This in turn limits animals' willingness to try less common behaviours unless they are forced through circumstances to explore alternate strategies. Despite the similar functional outcomes, it is critical to understand the underlying mechanisms present in different situations in order to make strong predictions about when innovation is, or is not, expected to emerge. We then consider how transmission biases and social learning mechanisms influence and limit the spread of inventions among individuals. Of course, these 'limits' are beneficial in other circumstances, and throughout this review we consider the trade-offs for these psychological mechanisms. (C) 2014 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.