Some of the most popular books on Personal Development and Cultural Evolution

In a previous post, I described different strategies to select your learning sources. One of these was the strategy of learning from the successful. In a series of posts, I’ll get deeper into this strategy. I’ll integrate ideas coming from personal development along with ideas coming from the scientific field of cultural evolution and social learning. In this series of posts, we’ll learn

• What authors on personal development and cultural evolution say about learning from the successful
• Why people don’t learn from the successful as much as it would be optimal for maximizing their learning
• What different types of information we can learn from the successful
• Two conceptualizations of learning from the successful

In the last post, I will provide some examples to integrate all this information together in a practical way.

So, let’s start at the beginning:

What do authors on personal development and cultural evolution say about learning from the successful?

Learning from the successful according to Personal Development

As far as I know, the literature about personal development has not developed a theory about how to select your learning sources to acquire valuable knowledge and skills. However, the industry has been built upon the idea that learning from successful individuals is key to becoming successful yourself. Many books on personal development describe the mindset and habits of extremely successful people, with some of the most popular being Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.

Furthermore, the belief that learning from successful individuals is extremely valuable for self-improvement is explicitly stated by many experts. Some examples would include: Brian Tracy who in Eat That Frog recommends “find[ing] out what other successful people do and do the same things until you get the same results”; and Robert Kiyosaki who says “If you want to go somewhere, it is best to find someone who has already been there” [1].

Learning from the successful is also what famous authors say they did to become successful themselves. For instance, Chris Guillebeau in the $100 Startup reports “I watched what other people had done and tried to reverse-engineer their success”. Fraser Doherty in the 48 Hour Start-up says that when he was trying to distribute SuperJam in big supermarkets, a successful entrepreneur gave him very valuable tips.

I could be providing examples like this until the infinitum. Almost every book about personal development [2] would tell you at some point a story of how learning from someone successful made a huge difference in the author and/or someone else’s life. The message is very basic and makes intuitive sense: learn from the successful to be successful yourself.

Learning from the Successful According to Cultural Evolutionary Theory

The advice of learning from the successful given by many personal development gurus agrees with what cultural evolutionary theory [3] predicts that people tend to do.

This prediction is based on Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The rationale is the following. Once our ancestors evolved the ability to effectively learn from others, there was a selective pressure to select sources of information with above-average knowledge and skills. Why? Because this increased the learner’s survival and reproduction, which are the only things that biological evolution cares about.

As successful individuals have above-average knowledge/skills, copying them would have increased the learners’ chances of survival and reproduction in comparison to people who didn’t learn from them. Therefore, modern humans are more likely to be the descendants of people who had a genetic tendency to learn from the successful than from people who didn’t have this tendency.

Nevertheless, there is another possibility: the predicted tendency to learn from the successful might itself be learned through social interaction. If people discover that they are more likely to receive a reward when they learn from the successful, it is likely that they develop the tendency to learn from the successful through mere associate learning. Or they could use metacognitive skills to figure out that learning from the most successful within their domain of interest is the best way to learn for them [4].

Experimental Evidence Supporting Cultural Evolutionary Theory

Independently of the mechanism, experimental research has found support for the prediction that people preferentially learn from the successful [5]. In one of these experiments, participants engaged in a computer task that simulated hunting with arrowheads. The task entailed the design of virtual arrowheads by manipulating five characteristics: its length, width, thickness, shape, and colour.

Experimental setup of the arrowhead experiment by Alex Mesoudi (2011) ‘An experimental comparison of human social learning strategies: payoff-biased social learning is adaptive but underused‘ published in Evolution & Human Behaviour. A) Characteristics that can be manipulated by the participant. B) Options given to the participants to copy the designs of other participants. 

The aim was to obtain the maximum caloric return in a series of virtual hunts. This was translated into bigger monetary compensation at the end of the experiment.

Participants could also copy the designs of other participants by following some of these strategies:
• learning from the successful or copying the values of the highest-scoring player in the group
• copying the values of a randomly selected player in the group
• copying the most popular values in the entire group
• copying the average values for the entire group

The results showed that learning from the successful was the most widely used strategy. It also demonstrated that doing so was beneficial for the learners: the greater the use of this strategy, the greater the success of the participants in the experimental task.

Personal Development vs Cultural Evolutionary Theory

The insights about learning from the successful coming from personal development and cultural evolutionary theory seem to be contradictory to some extent. It is like authors about personal development are recommending what people do anyway.

However, experimental evidence clearly shows that learning from the successful is underused, meaning that people learn much less from the successful than what would be optimal for them [6]. In the experiment reviewed above, the results were driven by a minority of participants who systematically learned from the successful. Curiously, they were also the best at individual learning, which suggests that they were good at integrating information from their own experiences with information from external sources.

This underuse also extends to everyday life as authors of personal development point out. Consequently, there is clearly room for improvement in the use of this social learning strategy.

So, the question is

“Why do people learn from the successful less than what they should to maximize their learning?”

I’ll answer it in the next post 😉

Dr Ángel V. Jiménez

Notes

[1] Kiyosaki posted this statement on Facebook on 18th February 2019.

[2] One part of the literature on personal development has a spiritual flavour. I’m not familiar with that literature, so my statement doesn’t refer to this type of books about personal development.

[3] Cultural Evolution is an interdisciplinary scientific field in which biologists, psychologists, economists, anthropologists, linguistics, and other scholars study the diffusion of ideas, technologies, and other cultural practices from an evolutionary perspective. They consider cultural evolution an evolutionary process on its own although it interacts with biological evolution. The reader interested in the topic will benefit from reading books such as Cultural Evolution by Alex Mesoudi and The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich. Note that 21st Century Cultural Evolution is very different from 19th Century Cultural Evolution of anthropologists such as Taylor and Morgan. They shouldn’t be mistaken.

[4] The reader interested in the debate about what mechanisms explained the tendency to use different social learning strategies might find useful the book Cognitive Gadgets by the cultural evolutionary psychologists Cecilia Heyes.

[5] See: Atkisson, C., O’Brien, M.J., & Mesoudi, A. (2012). Adult Learners in a Novel Environment Use Prestige-Biased Social Learning; Brand, C.O., Heap, S., Morgan, T.J.H. & Mesoudi, A. (2020). The emergence and adaptive use of prestige in an online social learning task; Mesoudi, A. (2011). An experimental comparison of human social learning strategies: payoff-biased social learning is adaptive but underused. 

[6] This occurs with social learning in general, not only with this strategy.