When natural selection favors imitation of parents

It is commonly assumed that parents are important sources of socially learned behavior and beliefs. However, the empirical evidence that parents are cultural models is ambiguous, and debates continue over their importance. A formal theory that examines the evolution of psychological tendencies to imitate parents (vertical transmission) and to imitate nonparent adults (oblique transmission) in stochastic fluctuating environments points to forces that sometimes make vertical transmission adaptive, but oblique transmission recovers more quickly from rapid environmental change.