UCLA

The human species is more reliant on cultural adaptation than any other species, but it is unclear how observational learning can give rise to faithful transmission of cultural adaptations. One possibility is that teaching facilitates accurate social transmission by narrowing the range of the inferences that learners make. However, there is wide disagreement about how to define teaching, and how to interpret the empirical evidence for teaching across cultures and species. The work presented here addresses central questions in the study of the evolution of teaching through the presentation of new data and a new theoretical framework for an evolutionary approach to the study of teaching.

Chapter 1 presents predictions about when teaching and non-vertical transmission may be adaptive, and uses interview data from Fijian villages to demonstrate that parents are more likely to teach in comparison to other kin, high-skill and highly valued domains are more likely to be taught, and oblique transmission is associated with high-skill domains, which are learned later in life.

Chapter 2 reviews three major approaches to the study of teaching--mentalistic, culture-based, and functionalist--and shows how these definitions fail to structure the cross-cultural and cross-species study 0f teaching. This chapter proposes a new framework of teaching types based on the learning problems teaching can solve, and reinterprets the existing evidence for teaching in humans and other animals in this framework. This chapter discusses the implications of this new framework, including the roles of cognitive constraints and cooperative dilemmas in how and when teaching evolves. It also offers an explanation as to why some types of teaching are uniquely human, and discusses future research directions.

Chapter 3 applies this theoretical framework, develops an ethogram for identifying naturally occurring teaching behavior outside the laboratory, and presents quantitative data from focal follows with young children in Fiji to test predictions about the form and function of teaching behavior. These data demonstrate that, as predicted in Chapter 2, teaching is present in non-western societies, more common among close kin, and lower-effort teaching types are more common than higher-effort ones.