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Even toddlers have a tendency to follow the crowd, according to a new study. 

It was found by the study that 2-year-olds and chimpanzees are more likely to copy actions when they see them repeated by three of their peers than if they see the same action done by one peer three times.

"I think few people would have expected to find that 2-year-olds are already influenced by the majority," said Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and Psycholinguistics. "Parents and teachers should be aware of these dynamics in children's peer interactions."

The findings show that humans and chimpanzees have shared strategies for social learning. Orangutans on the other hand don't seem to feel the same majority sway.

Prior studies demonstrated that children are sensitive to peer pressure already at preschool age. The researchers wanted to know whether the majority influences social learning at an even earlier age and in other primate species as well.

Haun's team built a box with three holes, each a different color. The box delivered a treat only when a ball was dropped into one of those three, colored holes. Toddlers, chimpanzees, and orangutans unfamiliar with the box were then allowed to watch as four of their same-species peers interacted with the box. The majority of those peer demonstrators had been trained to favor one color over the others.

When the 2-year-old and chimpanzee observers got their turn, they showed a tendency to favor the hole favored by their friends. Orangutans, however, chose amongst the holes at random.

"The tendency to acquire the behaviors of the majority has been posited as key to the transmission of relatively safe, reliable, and productive behavioral strategies," Haun says.

The study was published online on April 12 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.