CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The study of social learning sits at the interface of a truly astonishing number ofacademic disciplines. How many other fields could boast being central to bothsocial anthropology and human evolution; core material for both experimentalpsychologists and theoretically minded economists; or emerging influences inthe fields of both cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence?

The observation that many animals, including humans, acquire valuable lifeskills and knowledge through copying others has been the focus of attention ofanimal behaviorists dating back to Darwin. Likewise, social learning, the diffusionof innovations, conformity, and social influences on child development havebeen key concepts within the social sciences for over a century. However, in recentdecades, the field of social learning has received such unprecedented attentionspread across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and experiencedsuch growth, that researchers within the field have referred to an "explosion ofinterest" in the topic (Galef and Giraldeau 2001; Shettleworth 2001). Long goneare the days when research on imitation could (ungenerously) be characterizedas the esoteric province of an obscure branch of comparative psychology. Now,social learning is a rapidly growing subfield of animal cognition research; whilebiological anthropologists and archaeologists are constructing models of culturalevolution, economists are frequently talking norms and herding behavior, neuroscientistsare mapping circuitry associated with social influences on decisionmaking, and engineers are building imitating robots.

The diverse backgrounds of the researchers studying social learning contributeto the field's controversies. East African but not West African chimpanzees usestalks to fish for termites, while western but not eastern chimps crack open nutswith stone hammers. Capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica exhibit extraordinarysocial conventions, such as sniffing each other's hands and placing fingers in eachother's mouths. Humpback whales and chaffinches sing different songs than theirfellow conspecifics living in different regions. If these, and other, animal traditionsare acquired through social learning, are behavioral scientists justified inspeaking of animals possessing "culture"? Or are anthropologists correct to assertthat human cultures are so imbued with meaning, so permeated with symbolism,and so reliant on uniquely human aspects of cognition, that to liken them to thebehavioral traditions of animals is, frankly, ridiculous? Is human social learningshaped by evolved structure in the mind then biased to acquire content—fromchoosing sugar rich foods to admiring specific body shapes—that proved adaptiveamong our Pleistocene ancestors, as suggested by many evolutionary psychologists?Or is human learning dominated by general rules (e.g., copying thehighest payoff behavior or conforming to the local norm) that are for the mostpart acquired independently of their content, as claimed by cultural evolutionists?Is imitation critically dependent on the ability to take another individual'sperspective, to understand their goals, or on complex cognition? Are sociallylearned traditions constrained in order to be adaptive? Can cultural processessupport a viable form of group selection? And so on, and so forth. The controversiesare multiple, ripe, and engaging, enriched by the varied standpoints thatcharacterize adjacent disciplines struggling to understand a common topic.

The disparate backgrounds of those drawn into the field have also contributedto the newly emerging methods that are appearing to address these challenges.Until recently, experimental studies of social learning were restricted to behavioralinvestigations, typically conducted in the laboratories of comparative or developmentalpsychologists, and focused on very specific questions, such as: "Cananimals imitate?" or "Do children acquire violent dispositions from others?"Similarly, with the exception of some early experiments on birdsong learning,biologists' interest in social learning was pursued almost entirely through observationsand recordings of the natural behavior of animals, largely by ethologistsand primatologists.

In recent years, however, new methods have become available, considerablyexpanding the social learning researcher's toolbox. These include (i) experimentaland statistical methods that allow researchers to categorize cases of sociallearning according to their underlying psychological processes and learningmechanisms; (ii) neuroscientiic methods for identifying the brain structures,neural circuitry, and physiological processes underlying both social learning andsocial influences on decision making; (iii) mathematical and statistical methodsfor identifying social learning when it occurs in natural populations (or in naturalisticcontexts in captivity); (iv) experimental and statistical methods to predictand explain when humans and other animals copy, from whom they learn("social learning strategies"), and to also detect the strategies deployed; and (v)mathematical methods for predicting the pattern of diffusion of novel learned innovations,and for modeling cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution. Finally,numerous and diverse tools and procedures are available for applying sociallearning methods outside of academia. These range from commercial hatcheriestraining hatchery-reared fish to recognize predators and thereby enhance restockingefforts, to predicting the pattern of spread of technological innovationsand identifying likely targets for uptake.

This book is designed to be a complete and accessible practical guide for thesocial learning researcher and their students, as well as for others whose interestin social learning is less central. As it currently stands, there is no single sourcethat reviews the aforementioned conceptual and methodological...