There was an additional result that was not specifically predicted; the select few children with no
demonstration who were successful tended not to use a tool, instead—more efficiently perhaps—using
their hand. This result again highlights both the advantage and cost of using social information;
demonstration children were much more likely to be successful but also more likely to use a tool that
was actually unnecessary (cf. Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010). We take this as further evidence that when
children have no prior information, social information can promote high-fidelity copying of demonstrated
actions (Wood et al., 2013a) to the point of copying inefficient components (McGuigan
et al., 2007). It would be interesting to investigate what the children with social demonstrations would
have done if the tools were removed during their response; would they have been even less likely to
succeed than children with no social demonstrations because they were reliant on the social information
of using a tool for success?