Rather than rethink every problem from first principles, they do what other people do. But specialization begins at an early stage. Probably no more than one adult in a thousand is able to set up a spreadsheet that correctly measures the amounts of postretirement consumption possible with different retirement ages and different amounts of preretirement saving. There is a grand piece of sociobiology to be carried out here. In organizations such as armies, indi- vidual problem solving is constrained.
Most soldiers just take orders from officers.
And the scope for problem solving is limited for the more junior officers. Axtell and Epstein's focus, however, is on just one aspect of imitative behavior its dynamics. Their basic idea is that people cannot distinguish the true problem solvers from imitators. If they could, they would imitate right away and there would be no dynamics. Instead, people look around once a year and observe how others are behaving.