How We Learn Socially - Imitating, Collaborating, Storytelling

There are surprisingly few ways in which humans are unique from other animals. But one of the most remarkable ways that we truly are different is in our tendency to learn socially. Human beings exhibit what cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene refers to as “social attention sharing.”

Our attention systems and learning are highly dependent on the signals we receive socially. Babies gaze at faces and make eye contact before focusing their attention on the object the adult is looking at – in other words they are naturally more interested in the people around them than they are in learning things. Shared attention determines what children learn.

This phenomenon was best illustrated in a series of experiments by the Canadian-American psychologist Albert Bandura.

Albert Bandura is best known for his 1961 Bobo doll experiment, where he made a film in which an adult was shown “beating up a Bobo doll and shouting aggressive words.” The movie was then shown to a group of children, who were given a Bobo doll to play with afterwards.

The children who had seen the violent film clip were more likely to beat the doll; imitating the words and actions of the adult. This was a significant study as it departed from the insistence of the theory known as behaviorism.

Behaviorism argued that all behavior could be explained by reinforcement and reward. If a child was violent, it was because they had learned that violence gave them rewards. However, the children in the study had received no incentive or encouragement to beat up the doll – they were simply imitating the behaviors they had observed.

So, despite having no extrinsic or intrinsic incentive to beat up the doll, these children were imitating the behaviors of the people around them. Bandura concluded from this that there was more to the story of learning than just reinforcement and reward – there must be some way in which we are naturally included to imitate the behaviors of those around us.

In 1971, Bandura proposed that imitation was a key cornerstone of how we learn and develop behaviors: learning is social. Something in our brain chemistry makes us look at those around us and imitate them – whether or not it has a clear benefit to us. This is different to the behaviorist view, which would say we only learned behaviors that had a clear reward, or learned to avoid behaviors that had a bad outcome.

When you think about it, social learning makes a lot of evolutionary sense. The chances are, the older members of your family or tribe know a lot better than you do about how to survive and reproduce. If you simply imitate their behaviors, it makes for a far less risky way of learning about the world than by leaving everything to trial and error.

Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist who invented the socio-cultural theory of psychology. Vygotsky had a deep interest in the role of the social environment in shaping learning.

He is most famous for his theory of the ‘zone of proximal development.’ This is the area of knowledge that lies just beyond what a learner knows for sure, but which they can usually figure out with some assistance.

Vygotsky believed that getting learners to explore that area, with some guidance from people with greater mastery of it, was the optimal learning strategy.

The impetus to move beyond the zone of existing knowledge to the zone of proximal development, said Vygotsky, can come from the scaffolding of our teachers, but also from our peers, our parents, or our own psychological need to do better, know more, and achieve more.

He emphasized the active role of learners in the learning process. In short, we don’t just learn from the people trying to help us learn: our whole human environment has to be primed for us to learn.

For example, when a child learns to solve math problems, they may initially struggle to grasp new concepts on their own. Obviously, having a great teacher will help with that. But Vygotsky argued that a similarly important factor would be the other children in the class. Ideally, that child would be surrounded by children who were slightly more advanced than they are – whose knowledge fell into that child’s zone of proximal development.

Another example of applying socio-cultural learning in practice would be different forms of informal learning.

Informal learning refers to learning that occurs outside of a structured, formal classroom environment. In contrast to formal learning, informal learning is highly socially collaborative and learner-directed. Imagine that rather than having to learn a set of facts about the Vietnam War for your history test, your teacher simply asked you to come to the next class with five facts about the Vietnam War, and an explanation for why you found them interesting. Informal learning like this encourages learners to pursue what interests them.

Another feature that sets informal learning apart from formal learning is its removal from external assessment. Practitioners who support informal learning believe that the formal learning system of grading and testing as a tool for measuring performance impedes learning and is detrimental to learners’ confidence and motivation. Graded tests can also, ironically, lead to more cheating. In the fact-finding task above, cheating wouldn’t really be possible.

Many of history’s greatest memory masters were also storytellers. You may have heard of Homer’s epic poems, the Odyssey and Iliad. These were composed at some time in the late 8th or early 7th century BCE – more than two and a half thousand years ago.

We say ‘composed’, not ‘written’, because they probably weren’t written down in full until the 6th century, after Homer’s death. That means that for over one hundred years, these poems – each of which are tens of thousands of lines long – were passed on entirely from memory.

So both Homer and the many storytellers who memorized his work must have had incredible memories. If we look at how the brain processes stories, we’ll see that this is no coincidence.

Our brains are extremely good at retaining stories. It’s much easier to retain a story – even an extremely long, detailed one – than it is to remember an equivalent amount of disconnected information.

Neuroscience can help us understand why. There is an ‘intrinsic narrative drive’ in the cortex; it needs to weave stories out of our disparate experiences, in order to make sense of them. For the psychologist Patrick Lewis, “without the story form, humans would have endless unconnected, chaotic experiences.”

As with so many other points we’ve discussed, this tendency to weave our learning into narratives makes sense if you think of it from an evolutionary standpoint. Imagine you need to remember the route through a forest that avoids the local wolves. It will be far easier to remember the story your grandfather told you about someone who took the wrong, perilous paths, than to just remember isolated facts like ‘left at the lake’.

We all have a need to connect our information together, and narratives are an extremely effective way of doing this.

By using storytelling in learning contexts – whether in the classroom, or in committing facts to memory by using metaphor – we’re tapping into a part of our brain that’s primed to make connections and weave stories.

A community of practice is a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something and regularly use their existing knowledge. The concept has been studied in depth by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger; many consider it to be one of the most exciting areas of developmental psychology.

Educational theorist Etienne Wenger and cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave believed that members of a community of practice learn from each other and have an opportunity to develop through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group. It is not just learning but teaching that helps you remember things.

Communities of practice (CoPs) have existed for centuries. For example, in medieval Europe, artisans would club together to form guilds – groups that were set up to share trade secrets and cooperate in their field. If you were in, say, the clothworkers guild, you’d meet with other clothworkers to share your ideas, and mutually benefit from the pooling of expertise.

According to Wenger and Lave, this kind of gathering of practitioners is beneficial to all of them – not only do you have the opportunity to learn from others, you’ll also improve your own practice simply through the process of teaching others.

CoPs have evolved in type and nature with developments in technology. They can evolve naturally as a result of the members' common interest in a particular domain or area, or they can be created deliberately with the goal of gaining knowledge related to a specific field.

It can be useful to distinguish between a community of practice and a community of interest. A community of interest means hobbyists and observers, whereas a community of practice is a group of people who are active practitioners.

A book club would be an example of a community of interest. However, a writer’s club, where people share what they’d written each week, would be a community of practice. Basically, the distinction is about the level of active engagement.

It could be healthy to think of a classroom as a CoP – a group of people not just passively learning but actively helping each other to learn, for the benefit of all.

Communities of Practice can be physical or virtual. Online learning is an example of the latter. Online learning harnesses the principles of social learning by encouraging learners to collaborate and share information through discussion forums and mandatory self-introductions.

In the case of Kinnu, we have a community of practice in the form of our Discord server, where learners compare their progress, give each other tips, and generally chat about the content of our pathways. If you haven’t checked it out yet, we strongly suggest you do!

From our earliest days at elementary school we are taught not to share our answers with our classmates. But a wealth of research suggests that this is all wrong – students collaborating can actually be a far more effective way to learn than to leave it all to themselves.