Social learning means learning from the actions and advice of others. It has the advantage of taking less time and effort than learning from the results of one’s own actions. There are many things you could learn from others and there is limited time to learn it all. Therefore, a way to choose the learning sources that are tailored to your needs should be implemented. The aim of this selective process is to maximize the benefits of social learning and avoid its potential costs.

In this post, I would like to introduce for the first time on this website the concept of ‘social learning’ and outline some of the most common strategies to help you choose your learning sources.

Individual Learning vs Social Learning

Imagine you want to become an amazing guitar player. However, you have never played an instrument before, and you lack technical knowledge about music. How would you start?

You could just take a guitar and try to play it directly without the help of any external resources. If you choose this option, you will need to discover, by yourself, all the secrets of how to play the guitar. This includes figuring out what is the best way to stroke the strings with one hand while pressing the strings against the frets with the other. You would also need to discover which combinations of notes sound good together and which ones sound horrible.

This approach to learning seems very inefficient: it would be very slow. You will most likely miss a lot of techniques already discovered by others that would help you to be a better guitar player. In the scientific literature, this way of learning through self-exploration is known as individual learning.

I don’t think any of my readers would go this route. Instead, they would learn to play the guitar by relying on the information provided by others. They would try things like:

• Hiring a private tutor
• Asking for help from a friend who plays the guitar
• Watching videos on YouTube
• Following a handbook on how to play the guitar

Through this more social approach, the learner would soon discover that there are many different ways to stroke the strings. This, of course, is depending on the sound you are after and that there are predefined combinations of notes that tend to sound well together. The learner would soon be able to play an easy song and establish a good basis for further developing their skills with the help of more experienced others. This route to learning is known as social learning.

Man teaching boy how to play the guitar

Benefits of Social Learning

For your personal development, social learning has two key benefits. First, social learning will accelerate the acquisition of valuable knowledge and skills. You won’t have to reinvent the wheel, so you will get there faster without investing prohibitive amounts of time and energy. Second, the reliance on social learning will help you avoid the exploration of ineffective or potentially dangerous “solutions” to your challenges. For example, imagine you are learning to forage in the wild. If you rely exclusively on individual learning, then it is likely that you end up eating a poisonous plant. Learning from people who have already acquired this skill will ensure you avoid pitfalls.

The Trouble with Social Learning

Although the benefits of social learning are remarkable, social learning is not exempt from problems. To start with, you can learn from other people things that are not good for you. An example of that would be picking up an unhealthy habit like smoking because of the influence of your friends. You could also select as a learning source someone who is not great at the skill you want to acquire. In doing so, your approach to learning this new skill would be suboptimal. Another potential problem is to copy a solution that is effective for others but that is not appropriate for your personal situation.

Because of these problems, social learning needs to be selective to be really beneficial for you, meaning that you should carefully pick your learning sources [1].

Strategies to Select your Learning Sources

In this section, I enumerate the most common strategies that people use to select their learning sources and outline some of their benefits and limitations.

Learning from the Successful

Woman learning from successful coach

Learning from the successful means copying and asking for advice from people who have achieved outstanding results in the skill you are after. Examples of following this strategy are:

• Asking for advice from a recent graduate with the highest GPA in the course you are about to take
• Copying the investing strategies of extremely successful investors like Warren Buffet
• Hiring a business coach who has built up a multi-million business
• Attending the classes of the best teachers in your area for the skill you want to acquire

The intuitive appeal of the strategy of learning from the successful is clear. There is no point to learn from someone who hasn’t developed enough of the skill you are after. In many circumstances, this strategy would lead to gaining valuable knowledge and skills.

Unfortunately, the strategy of learning from the successful has some limitations. Three limitations are:

• It is not always easy to evaluate yourself who is highly competent at something
• Successful individuals might be inaccessible to you so you cannot benefit from their advice
• The situation of successful individuals might be very different from yours, so their knowledge might not be applicable to your situation

Because of these problems, relying exclusively on the strategy of learning from the successful would be unpractical.

Learning from the Prestigious

Women paying attention and learning from a specific woman in the group

Correctly identifying by yourself who is very skilful at something is not easy if there are other factors affecting the results someone gets. Take the cryptocurrency market as an example. Newbies can buy some crypto and get nice returns if they enter the market in an upward trend. Does this mean they are skilful at trading? Probably not. You will need to observe their performance during several upward and downward trends to reach an accurate conclusion about their skill as traders.

Because of the challenges to correctly identifying top performers in certain areas without extremely prolonged observations, we often (not necessarily consciously) use shortcuts. That is, we rely on prestige cues to identify who is likely competent to select them as learning sources. By prestige cues, I mean cues related to the behaviour of other people towards an individual such as the amount of attention, deference, and admiration an individual receives [2]. The rationale for using these cues for social learning is the following: if the behaviour of many people suggests they believe that Peter is the best crypto trader around, he is probably great.

The advantage of this strategy is clear. It is much easier and less costly to rely on prestige cues than to evaluate the competence of someone during prolonged periods of time by yourself. The disadvantage is that prestige and skill do not always strongly correlate. However, a strong correlation is highly likely to hold in many scenarios due to two reasons. First, prestige cues are not self-generated such as the level of confidence as they are the behaviour of multiple people. Consequently, they are difficult to fake. Second, these cues are regularly updated. This means that people would pay less attention to Peter if they suddenly found out he has lost a lot of money doing trading recently. The opposite could also happen. People will pay more attention to Mary if they discover that she is more competent than they previously believed.

Learning from the Accessible

Father teaching a young boy how to ride a bicycle. 

Another social learning strategy that we regularly engage with is to learn from people whom we share key characteristics with. The rationale for this strategy is that the skills and advice of someone similar to us have more probability of being applicable to us.

One of these key characteristics is sex. There are some biological and cultural differences between men and women that would often make learning from a same-sex individual often advantageous. Take, for example, training at the gym. The different hormonal profiles and distribution of body fat between men and women are so remarkable that you would be much more likely to get better tips from same-sex experienced gym-goers.

Personality traits can also be of importance. If you are an introvert going to a job interview, the advice of another introvert who has landed a job like the one you are after will likely be more applicable to you than the advice of an extroverted guy.

Sharing some important values with your potential learning sources is often fundamental. If you love freedom, the career advice given by someone who gives a strong importance to security would be probably inadequate for you.

Of course, the fact that someone is similar to you in some specific characteristic does not necessarily entail that their advice is good. Because of this, this learning strategy should be combined with other strategies. For example, you could select someone to learn from who is both similar to you in some key characteristics and successful in the skill you want to acquire.

Conclusion

All of the strategies reviewed above are quite intuitive. I imagine that many readers would feel that this is the way we tend to learn from others, and it isn’t necessary to read about it.

The truth, however, is that social learning is underused. A recent review of the relevant experimental literature documented 45 studies in which participants underuse social learning, while only 4 studies in which participants overuse it. This general underuse gives us an extraordinary opportunity to use social learning for our own benefit. That’s why I am writing about social learning on a website focused on personal development. I believe that by studying the benefits and limitations of different social learning strategies in different situations, you will place yourself ahead of the learning game. You’ll learn faster, more effectively, and with fewer costs.

In future posts, I will discuss in more detail each of the strategies. I am currently writing a long post about learning from the successful. Stay tuned!

Dr Ángel V. Jiménez

Notes

[1] It also needs to be critical. That is, you should use your judgment to figure out whether the advice given by others is appropriate for your case. I leave the question of critical social learning for a future post.

[2] Technically, these are second-order prestige cues. That is, cues of competence that rely on the behaviour of other people towards an individual. There also exist first-order prestige cues. That is, cues of competence based on characteristics of the individual such as their age, level of confidence, job title, etc. See the review paper I wrote with Alex Mesoudi on the use of prestige cues for social learning.

References

To write this post, I have mainly relied on William Hopitt and Kevin Laland’s book ‘Social Learning: An Introduction to Mechanisms, Methods, and Models’ and the review paper I wrote with Alex Mesoudi ‘Prestige-biased social learning: current evidence and outstanding questions’.