The research aims of this thesis are to experimentally investigate how behaviours spread socially, and what factors contribute to the development of group-wide social traditions in capuchins (Cebus apella). Given the apparent convergent evolution between such monkeys and great apes, capuchin traditions are of great interest anthropologically and for a biological and psychological understanding of culture. Several studies have investigated social learning in capuchins, but few have made headway into understanding how it supports the development of traditions either in the wild or in captivity. By experimentally introducing novel foraging behaviours into several captive groups, the studies included in this thesis simulate the development of foraging behaviours so that their spread can be studied from various viewpoints. Five experiments are presented investigating: (1) the chained transmission of foraging behaviours, (2) the role of social facilitation on the rate of individual learning, (3) the fidelity of learning from localised stimulus enhancement & object-movement re-enactment, (4) the quality of individual relationships in the social transmission of novel foraging techniques, and (5) the open diffusion of group-specific foraging behaviours in capuchin monkeys. Together, these experiments explore how traditions may develop, ranging from individual learning to how behaviour patterns may spread socially based on social ties within the group.

Human culture is unique in its scope and complexity and is underpinned by the social transmission of information. Successful individuals will use both social and asocial information effectively. Evolutionary theory suggests that social learning should be guided by evolved learning rules that dictate when individuals rely on social information, a literature which I review across Chapters 1 and 2, with the emphasis of chapter 2 being on conformist transmission. In this thesis I present experimental investigations of the existence and adaptive value of several such strategies in both adults (Chapter 3) and young children (Chapter 4). In all cases I find strong evidence for the existence of such biases and show that they act to increase the accuracy of decisions. In particular I show individuals are highly sensitive to even small majorities within a group of demonstrators. The youngest children (age 3) however, show little sensitivity to social information and do not use it effectively. In Chapter 5 I present an investigation into the role of social learning in the evolution of hominin lithic technology. I conclude that even the earliest hominin flaking technology is poorly transmitted through observation alone and so the widespread and longstanding persistence of such tools implies some form of teaching. Furthermore, I conclude that the stable transmission of more complex technologies would likely require teaching, and potentially symbolic communication. I also postulate a co-evolution of stone tools and complex communication and teaching. In Chapter 6 I conclude that the cultural evolutionary approach, focussing on the evolutionary consequences of social information use and treating culture as a system of inheritance partially independent of genes, seems successful in increasing our understanding of the evolution of social learning.

This investigation of social learning processes in the Chipembere gardening project was conducted in Rockvale village one in Sebakwe communal area in the Midlands province of Zimbabwe. In essence, the study sought to explore how the Chipembere gardening project as a community-based natural resource management initiative (CBNRM), was reflecting and supporting social learning processes of change. It also sought to enrich and deepen an organizational understanding of social learning and to generate ideas and draw recommendations that could be used to strengthen learning in other CBNRM projects. The research was undertaken as a qualitative case study with data generated through semi-structured interviews with individuals and groups. It also included an analysis of project documents and an extended period of participant observation on site and in the gardening activities. Data were indexed and coded for generating analytical memos that were used to extract and represent the scope of social learning interations within the developing project. The study found that within the Chipembere gardening project a wide range of learning interactions were significant in shaping the developing project. Furthermore, these interactions were earmarked as the major drivers of social learning processes within the project. The study concluded that the social learning interactions amongst the gardeners in the Chipembere community garden were instrumental in fostering change that enhanced community livelinhoods and wellbeing.

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the influences of industry dynamic factors (e.g., peer selections) on a client’s subsequent decision to select the type of auditor (e.g., Big N versus non-Big N), following auditor turnover. More specifically, drawing on social norms and social learning theories, I develop testable implications and investigate whether and how industry dynamics have an incremental power in explaining auditor choice beyond traditional firm-specific variables documented in prior research. Using a large sample from years 1988 – 2012, I find that clients are more likely to imitate their industry peers’ prior selections to select the type of their succeeding auditors, consistent with the implications of social learning theory. I also find that clients in industries with stronger industry norms, as measured by a greater proportion of clients audited by Big N auditors in an industry, are more likely to select Big N auditors as their succeeding auditors, consistent with the implications of social norms theory. To my best knowledge, this is the first study to explore the impact of social dynamics measured at the industry level on auditor selection and provide large-sample evidence on the relations between industry dynamics and auditor selection at the firm level. Findings of this study provide insights into the dynamic process of auditor selection in which companies do not make auditor-selection decisions in isolation of one another as often posited in existing literature, contribute to the research on the determinants of auditor choice by incorporating industry dynamics into an agent-principal model, and provide a more comprehensive view of the phenomenon of auditor selection.

The aim of this study was to examine to what extent Social Structure and Social Learning Theory (SSSL) explains delinquent behaviors among Turkish adolescents. While Social Structure and Social Learning (SSSL) Theory have been examined quite frequently in the criminology and sociology literature, the present study is unique as it tests the theory in Turkey, a context with a mixed Islamic and Secular cultural structure. The data originates from a survey conducted in Istanbul in 2008 by the Icelandic Centre for Social Research and Analysis (ICSRA) under the auspices of their Youth in Europe project. The sample includes 2,445 Turkish high school students. The dependent variable includes a 13-item delinquency scale, and the independent variables consist of differential association, costs and rewards of differential reinforcement, definitions, imitation, differential location in the social structure, and differential social location of groups. The statistical analyses were conducted using a negative binomial regression approach. Results demonstrated that differential association (peer delinquency) is positively associated with delinquent behaviors among Turkish adolescents. In addition, there is a significant and positive relationship between norms/beliefs that favor delinquency and delinquent behaviors. Moreover, parental reaction, a measure of differential reinforcement, has a negative impact on delinquency. Imitation variables, which include witnessing an argument and witnessing violence in the family, also appear as significant predictors for delinquency. Gender is the only social structure variable significantly related to delinquent behaviors. Furthermore, results indicated that social learning variables mediated the relationship between social structure and delinquent behaviors. Policy implications and suggestions for further studies are also provided at the end of the dissertation.

Published Article / The paper reports on the findings of a study that investigated the impact of leadership and management on the construction of professional identity of teacher trainees. The writer argues that the overall leadership and management of the host schools, where student teachers do experiential training (teaching practice), has an impact on the construction of their professional identity. The host schools provide different learning experiences (environment) which may either enhance or hinder the development of a positive professional identity. A questionnaire comprising of open-ended questions was administered to 40 teacher trainees at the School of Teacher Education, Central University of Technology, Free State. The students had just return from a six-month period of experiential training. The aim of the questionnaire was to examine their views on their experiences and expectations of the teaching practice, and whether or not the leadership and management of the school has had an impact on the construction of their professional identity. The findings revealed that a supportive and enabling environment within the host school provided a good learning experience and consequently enhanced the development of a positive professional identity whereas a non-welcoming and threatening environment had the opposite effect. Suggestions and recommendations for providing a supportive and enabling environment for all students are made.

In the first chapter, I examine the effect of social learning on social norms of cooperation. To this end I develop an 'anti-social learning' game. This is a dynamic social dilemma in which all agents know how to cooperate but a proportion are informed and know of privately profitable but socially costly, or uncooperative, actions. In equilibrium agents are able to infer, or learn, the payoffs to the actions of prior agents. Agents can then learn through observation that some socially costly action is privately profitable. This implies that an informed agent behaving uncooperatively can induce others to behave uncooperatively when, in the absence of observational learning, they would have otherwise been cooperative. However, this influence also gives informed agents an incentive to cooperate - not cooperating may induce others to not cooperate. I use this model to give conditions under which social learning propagates cooperative behaviour and conditions under which social learning propagates uncooperative behaviour. In the second chapter, I present a co-authored model of a self-fulfilling price cycle in an asset market. In this model the dividend stream of the economy's asset stock is constant yet price oscillates deterministically even though the underlying environment is stationary. This creates a model in which there is rational excess volatility - 'excess' in the sense that it does not reflect changes in dividend streams and 'rational' in that all agents are acting on their best information. The mechanism that we uncover is driven by endogenous variation in the investment horizons of the different market participants, informed and uninformed. On even days, the price is high; on odd days it is low. On even days, informed traders are willing to jettison their good assets, knowing that they can buy them back the next day, when the price is low. The anticipated drop in price more than offsets any potential loss in dividend. Because of these asset sales, the informed build up their cash holdings. Understanding that the market is flooded with good assets, the uninformed traders are willing to pay a high price. But their investment horizon is longer than that of the informed traders: their intention is to hold the assets they purchase, not to resell. On odd days, the price is low because the uninformed recognise that the informed are using their cash holdings to cherry-pick good assets from the market. Now the uninformed, like the informed, are investing short-term. Rather than buy-and-hold as they do with assets purchased on even days, on odd days the uninformed are buying to sell. Notice that, at the root of the model, there lies a credit constraint. Although the informed are flush with cash on odd days, they are not deep pockets. On each cherry that they pick out of the market, they earn a high return: buying cheap, selling dear. However they don't have enough cash to strip the market of cherries and thereby bid the price up. The final chapter is on identifying the role of privilege in determining inter- generational mobility. The intergenerational elasticity of income is the standard measurement economists use for intergenerational mobility. It is not clear how we should interpret intergenerational elasticities. Particularly, high intergenerational elasticities could either reflect inequality of opportunity or the importance of genetically heritable characteristics in determining genes. Behavioural geneticists have long been using a twin based variance decomposition method, the ACE model, to estimate the genetic heritability of various characteristics. It is not clear, however, what this approach implies for intergenerational mobility of equality of opportunity. I develop a novel method that extends the methodology used in behavioural genetics to identifying how much of the intergenerational elasticity of income is determined by the presence (absence) of environmental privileges associated with being children of high (low) earners. Using this approach we can examine the counterfactuals of giving a poorer child the environment of a richer child; equalising the privileges associated with family income; and equalising the family environmental factors not associated with parental income. Furthermore, this method allows us to identify how good parental income is as a measure of family environment. The model I develop nests the behavioural genetics model allowing us to relax some of the identifying assumptions used in the standard ACE model. Finally, I apply this method to data on the income elasticities between American males of different types of relation: fraternal twins, identical twins and father-son relationships. The results of this application suggest that a 1 percent increase in the privilege associated with parental income increases child income by about 1 tenth of a percent. Equalising, to the mean, the environmental privileges across the population results in about a 30 percent drop in the intergenerational elasticity of income and a 5 percent drop in the variance of income across the population. These results must be treated tentatively as the twin data comes from a separate survey to the data on intergenerational elasticities.

This research addresses two puzzles: Why do similar regions within countries pursue different commitment strategies towards growing their bioscience industries? Why do some change in response to a global financial shock and others do not? I argue that the presence and strength of a knowledge-oriented strategy team (KOST) helps to explain different levels of and changes in bioscience commitment strategies. The study weaves in additional explanations including natural resources, rival industries, national institutions and path dependence. The most significant finding of this research is that those Canadian provinces that established a strong KOST prior to the 2008 global financial crisis "puzzled and powered through" to maintain high level commitments to their bioscience industries afterwards. Their KOSTs engaged in disruptive social learning and coordinative bargaining processes.

This is an ethnographic study conducted in a first grade classroom where the learning environment was structured by a teacher using a whole language philosophy. The focus of the study was on the instructional and social organization of the classroom and how they influenced the literacy learning of Yaqui Indian students. This classroom was selected because it was reputed as providing an effective learning environment. The study was developed to investigate the discontinuity and mismatch theory. This theory suggests that the interactional styles, ways of learning, and experiences of Indian children in the home/community may not match those typically used in schools. These cultural differences may affect their learning in the classroom. Data was gathered through being a participant observer in the classroom during three school years; formal and informal interviews with the teacher, students, parents of the Yaqui students, and staff members; examination of school documents and records; a teacher-researcher dialogue journal; and the attendance of events in the school and community. The findings are presented through a description and interpretation of events in the classroom. They are based on the understanding of how one teacher organized the learning environment to accommodate the Yaqui students' experiences and cultural background while facilitating literacy learning. The findings incorporate the most recent theories of language organization of instruction, the social organization in the classroom, and the teacher interacted together to create a social context that contributed to the quality of learning and participation in the classroom. This is a case study of a classroom with a relatively unique population of students and a particular teacher. What can be generalized from this study to other classrooms is an understanding of the influence the instructional and social organization has on student learning and a methodology that can be used to study this issue. The learning theories, organization of instruction and social organization described can serve as an example for other teachers and illustrate the power of this methodology.

Networks and the relationships embedded in them are critical determinants of how people communicate, form beliefs, and behave. E-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay have made actions of "strangers" more observable to others. More recently, social media websites such as Facebook and Google Plus have created networks of "friends", and the actions of these friends have become more visible than ever before to consumers. This dissertation develops an analytical model to examine how social learning occurs in different types of networks. Specifically, I examine the pure-strategy perfect Bayesian equilibrium of observational learning in a friend-network vs. a stranger-network. In this model, each individual makes an adopt-or-reject decision about a product after receiving a private signal regarding the underlying quality of the product and observing past actions of other individuals in the network. Grounded on the homophily theory in sociology, the degree of network heterogeneity defines the key difference between a friend-network and a stranger-network. I show a threshold effect of network size regarding which network carries more valuable information: when the network size is small, a friend-network carries more valuable information than a stranger-network does. But when the network size gets larger, a stranger-network dominates a friend-network. This suggests two competing effects of network homogeneity on social learning: individual preference effects and social conforming effects. I also test key implications from theoretical results using experiments to demonstrate internal validity and enhance insights on social learning in networks. I found that experimental results are in line with predictions from the theoretical model.