Social learning 101

Recently I’ve been dipping more widely into general anthropology discourses, and learning how much there is to cover. A recent quick take on a paper meant looking harder at prosociality, and here I’ll be looking at another term I have not spend time to do a proper background check on.

This may develop into an ongoing series, and will be more useful than the time I spend on the suboptimal pothole of evolution~morality (giant windmills I enjoy charging).

First some cribbing from wikipedia which is an excellent example of more directed social-learning support I would say, as indeed is science and literature generally (not everything we do is supportive).

Social learning (social pedagogy) is learning that takes place at a wider scale than individual or group learning, up to a societal scale, through social interaction between peers.

As such it is one outcome of prosociality. Which may well be Homo sapiens defining characteristic (gives a side-glance towards Slimak’s Naked Neanderthal).

On top of this we also have:

Social learning theory is a theory of social behavior that proposes that new behaviors can be acquired by observing and imitating others. It states that learning is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context and can occur purely through observation or direct instruction, even in the absence of motor reproduction or direct reinforcement.

So, in this post I will be riffing on how it affect the world of worlding (and how much I have re-invented the wheel, at least emotionally).

Without a worlding urge, which is one part (pro)social behaviour and one part the urge to suit one’s environment to oneself. Where, thus, this 'environment' in a social animal then primarily involves the selves of others in that environment from whom we learnt to be ourselves in the first place. Where, again, the ‘place’ of negotiating and informing all of the above is more important than our true selves (which is social even in the hermit as the asocial do not even notice possibility the social environment). More important in defining the species we survive among.

Anthropology tends to look at that social learning by way of how societies maintain themselves through time, and the styles and features they develop to maintain it which are mapped according to various measures (dear psychologists & economists there are indeed numbers and maths).

Here innovation and transmission are more important than invention and heroic measures, even if a society uses those latter types of stories pedagogically as role models or the basis/focus/altar for ritual activity (devotional soteriologically or collectively).

The maintenance of a toolkit is more important than the invention of a tool, because you can solve problems quicker by copying a solution than re-inventing the wheel. You might have to re-invented the wheel if you have no one to copy that from. But you may not have the time to do that before you die and so not pass on your success at social learning methods in maintaining toolkits, or just survival tips that come in handy every three generations.

In terms of big history and evolution of Homo sp. as an inter-discipinary reading (palaeo-anthropology as it becomes palaeontology looking back, and looking outwards from the genus Homo becomes primtalology, and hopefully inwards into the psychopathology of personalities disorders) what is then key is inter-group competition, where what does well in broader geographic and ecological niches Homo sp. have spread over, is directly related to how well they maintain options and responses in a challenging environment that is harsh, unpredictable and as unforgiving as can be.

It is important to realise that the group is one expression or bounded collection or toolkit of what is available in a known/mapped solution space. The group is not a race in the sense of some genetic proximity, populations will have geographic similarities because the bottleneck of sex is difficult at a distance, but usually leads to speciation whereas in Homo sp. where speciation has almost happened completely it is likely that inter-group selection did not give a fuck about the differences, and roll it back, and what appears to be our solitary success is collateral damage to doing social learning bettter (irony).

Group selection proponents would to account for the surety in the genus Homo that inter-group events have managed to undo selective pressure which massacres and social stratification supposedly could do to separate us. Group selection theorists and thier idiot subsets of race believers have not done so very well at this at all (I say believers because they are devoted). Harping on about IQ is not going to help you. You will just look stupid and there is no fixing that.

Inter-group selection is evidenced, in particular, by the propensity of human individuals to move to another group and integrate.

Inter-group selection is not just competition between groups as ‘tribal’ entities (which those with preferences for strong external boundaries are likely to perceive) like sports teams on a battlefield of reality.

It is also the competition for members. A group is no group without individuals, and if they can just join another group that works for them…

This is a potential Markov chain (my new word for the week) or analogous to.

With a prosocial propensity, and in the arena of social learning, people can and will wander off and join other groups, if only because people have a strong want or interest in what other people are doing. This is why some groups develop techniques of social identity, it helps their survival, which is perhaps a too strong a word in a prosocial setting (fashions of identity might be better i.e. tradition! -- a weak group but one worried about both internal relationships and external boundaries).

It is important to point out that both adoption and slavery are outcomes of this ability to change groups in both sexes. Sometimes it is hard to tell them apart as YMMV.

In most primates given the strictures of avoiding in-breeding there is a sexual dimorphism as to who who goes off to mate into another group (if you can call a close-kin troop a group). Humans do all of the above.

The ability to join another group does not have to be actual in every generation, available everyday, it just has to be possible. If it is possible and selectively positive then it will have an influence over time. (Yet again I am a continuist).

This is another reason why morality will never been hardwired, people move between groups, and can do so because of processes which support social learning. The outsourcing of problem solving and maintaining that information (however badly) works against hardwiring, and even undoes it in rollback as Garvey puts it. Thus Group selection is also undone by social learning propensities and activities.

We’ve been doing social learning and exploring its solution space over every geography and subsequent ecology, with one eye on the stars, and thus our stelliferously subsequent economies for some hundreds of thousands of years.

I call it the world, and the effort to live it is worlding.

Anything that restricts social learning (which some groups learn to do) and inter-group competition very likely leads to the de-selection of that group (obvious example are the narcissists’ death cults and whose pathology requires it’s own digression here but not now). Even the death drive can be learned in a social learning environment, call it nihilism or narcissism is you like, it is context and perspective dependent.

We do regulate them, if unconsciously, but not always successfully, and the group likely disappears.

The world goes on.

Crossposted at substack.com. Other posts on this human evolution as a broad topic see linkpost.