In school people clan and desperately look for some
identity to copy.
This struck me. The most intelligent and self-aware of my friends seem to have consciously chosen some person or character to copy in high school or middle school. Perhaps this is a clever way to satisfy the urge while still being self-defined. I emulated the classic mad scientist archetype, for example, and it'd led me to reasonable success. I also suspect that practices such as spirit animals, guardian angels, and the whole positive-affirmations thing are related to this; to a first approximation, these advise that a person create an external target and attempt to emulate that target, and could have evolved as another way to sneak some self-definition through the copying.
Ha interesting! I was in the business of copying the mannerisms and styles of some of my college professors. It was fun, it was sort of a game I played.
Some cultures engage in this copying behavior. I noticed Japanese do it quite often. They will emulate behavior and outward appearance of other cultures (American, European) without seemingly understanding the meaning of such behaviors. It hard to describe, if you see it, you'll know it.
