Social learning Quotes

“We define learning as the transformative process of taking in information that, when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced, changes what we know and builds on what we can do. It’s based on input, process, and reflection. It is what changes us.”

“Strategies that did well in competition with other strategies were not, however, those that maximized the returns to agents. Rather, we found a strong inverse relationship between the mean fitness of individuals in populations containing only one strategy, and that strategy's performance in the tournament. This finding illustrates the parasitic effect of strategies that rely heavily on OBSERVE. Strategies using a mixture of social and asocial learning are vulnerable to being outcompeted by those using social learning alone, which may result in a population with lower average returns. These findings are evocative of an established rule in ecology; this specifies that, among competitors for a scarce resource, the dominant competitor will be the species that can persist at the lowest resource level. An equivalent rule may apply when alternative social learning strategies compete: the strategies that eventually dominates will be the one that can persist with the lowest frequency of asocial learning.”

“By bringing together people who share interests, no matter their location or time zone, social media has the potential to transform the workplace into an environment where learning is as natural as it is powerful.”

“Social tools leave a digital audit trail, documenting our learning journey—often an unfolding story—and leaving a path for others to follow.”

“It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may well be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes—perhaps even of the pressed-together sound clusters we call words. By hyperdeveloping the mirror-neuron system, evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to hostile new environments and figure out how to exploit formerly inaccessible or poisonous food sources in just one or two generations—instead of the hundreds or thousands of generations such adaptations would have taken to accomplish through genetic evolution.Thus culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure, which helped select brains that had even better mirror-neuron systems and the imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of the many self-amplifying snowball effects that culminated in Homo sapiens, the ape that looked into its own mind and saw the whole cosmos reflected inside.”

“Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change.”

“In a world of rapid change, we each need to garner as much useful information as possible, sort through it in a way that meets our unique circumstances, calibrate it with what we already know, and re-circulate it with others who share our goals.”

“Training often gives people solutions to problems already solved. Collaboration addresses challenges no one has overcome before.”