The word “copycat” originated in 19th-century America as a schoolyard taunt. The earliest known use in print comes from 1887, when Constance Cary Harrison wrote in her memoir *Bar Harbor* that “Our boys say you are a copy cat, if you write in anything that’s been already printed.” The Oxford English Dictionary dates its earliest recorded evidence slightly later, to 1896, in the writing of American author Sarah Orne Jewett. Either way, the term was born in the culture of late 1800s New England and spread quickly from there.
Why “Cat” Means Imitator
The “copy” half is straightforward, but the “cat” part has deeper roots. During medieval times, “cat” was a common term of contempt for a person. Calling someone a cat implied they were sneaky, untrustworthy, or beneath you. By pairing “copy” with “cat,” the phrase carried a built-in insult: you weren’t just imitating someone, you were doing it in a low, contemptible way. The word started as playground slang, a way for children to shame a peer for lacking originality, and it kept that mildly derogatory flavor as it entered adult vocabulary.
How Imitation Works in the Brain
Humans are natural copycats, and there’s a neurological reason for it. A group of brain cells known as mirror neurons fire both when you perform an action and when you watch someone else perform the same action. Your brain essentially rehearses what it sees, which is why watching someone yawn makes you yawn, and why children pick up behaviors from adults without being told to. Studies of infant brain activity suggest this mirror system develops before 12 months of age, giving babies a built-in mechanism for learning through observation long before they can understand language.
This wiring helps explain why copying is so fundamental to human development. In 1961, psychologist Albert Bandura demonstrated this dramatically with his Bobo doll experiment. Children who watched an adult punch and kick an inflatable doll went on to do the same thing when left alone with the doll. No one encouraged or rewarded them. They simply reproduced what they’d seen. Bandura called this observational learning and identified four elements that make it work: paying attention to the behavior, remembering it, being physically able to reproduce it, and having some motivation to do so.
From Playground Insult to Criminal Term
The word took on a much darker meaning in the 20th century when it entered criminology and journalism. A “copycat crime” describes an offense directly inspired by an earlier crime or its media coverage. The concept has four components: a generator crime that gets attention, a model that shows how the crime was carried out, an individual who absorbs that information, and a subsequent crime that mirrors the original in significant ways. The core idea is that without exposure to the first event, the second one either wouldn’t have happened or would have taken a different form.
Research published in the American Journal of Public Health found that after a mass shooting, there is a temporary increase in the probability of another similar event within the next 13 days on average. The intensity of media coverage appears to matter. In studies of suicide, a dose-response relationship has been observed: more coverage of a suicide leads to more imitative suicides afterward. Researchers believe the same dynamic applies to other violent acts, particularly when coverage is perceived as granting the perpetrator notoriety or elevated social status.
The Werther Effect: Copycatting Before the Word Existed
The phenomenon of mass imitation predates the word “copycat” by more than a century. In 1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published *The Sorrows of Young Werther*, a novel in which a lovesick young man takes his own life. The book was a sensation across Europe, and reports soon emerged of readers imitating the character’s death, sometimes while wearing the same style of clothing described in the novel. Goethe himself acknowledged the pattern, writing that his friends “thought that they must transform poetry into reality, imitate a novel like this in real life.”
Whether a true wave of imitative deaths occurred was never conclusively proven, but authorities took the threat seriously enough to ban the book in Italy, Copenhagen, and Leipzig. In Leipzig, even the Werther costume was banned. One documented case: on January 16, 1778, a woman named Christel von Lassberg drowned herself in the River Ilm in Weimar. A copy of Goethe’s novel was found in her pocket. Sociologists later named this pattern of media-inspired imitation “the Werther effect,” and it remains one of the most studied examples of contagion behavior.
Copycats in Nature and Commerce
Copying isn’t unique to humans. In biology, Batesian mimicry describes a survival strategy where a harmless species evolves to look like a dangerous one. A non-venomous snake that resembles a coral snake, for instance, gains protection because predators can’t tell the difference and avoid both. The “copycat” species gets the benefit of a toxic reputation without producing any toxin. This form of natural imitation has evolved independently across insects, reptiles, and amphibians.
In the marketplace, “copycat” describes brands that deliberately imitate the packaging, naming, or visual identity of well-known competitors. A store-brand butter called “Norpak” positioned next to the leading brand “Lurpak” is a classic example, using similar spelling and packaging to ride on the original’s reputation. Research into consumer psychology shows mixed results for this strategy. Copycat brands sometimes benefit from positive associations with the original, but they can also trigger skepticism when consumers recognize the imitation as deliberate. In experiments, a copycat brand was preferred over a generic name when the product was closely related to the original brand’s category, but the advantage disappeared for unrelated products.
What started as a children’s insult in 1880s Maine now spans criminology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and marketing. The word endures because the behavior it describes is woven into nearly every corner of human and animal life.