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The Pedagogue, the Engineer, and the Friend

From Whom Do We Learn?

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Abstract

Humans can follow different social learning strategies, sometimes oriented toward the models’ characteristics (i.e., who-strategies). The goal of the present study was to explore which who-strategy is preferentially followed in the technological context based on the models’ psychological characteristics. We identified three potential who-strategies: Copy the pedagogue (a model with high theory-of-mind skills), copy the engineer (a model with high technical-reasoning skills), and copy the friend (a model with high level of prosocialness). We developed a closed-group micro-society paradigm in which participants had to build the highest possible towers. Participants began with an individual building phase. Then, they were gathered to discuss the best solutions to increase tower height. After this discussion phase, they had to make a new building attempt, followed by another discussion phase, and so forth for a total of six building phases and five discussion rounds. This methodology allowed us to create an attraction score for each participant (the more an individual was copied in a group, the greater the attraction score). We also assessed participants’ theory-of-mind skills, technical-reasoning skills, and prosocialness to predict participants’ attraction scores based on these measures. Results show that we learn from engineers (high technical-reasoning skills) because they are the most successful. Their attraction power is not immediate, but after they have been identified as attractors, their technique is copied irrespective of their pedagogy (theory-of-mind skills) or friendliness (prosocialness). These findings open avenues for the study of the cognitive bases of human technological culture.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Grégoire Desquiens for assistance in data collection and Célia Camus for assistance in data processing.

Funding

This work was supported by grants from ANR (Agence Nationale pour la Recherche; Project “Cognition and tool-use economy” ECOTOOL; ANR-14-CE30-0015-01), and was performed within the framework of the LABEX CORTEX (ANR-11-LABX-0042) of Université de Lyon, within the program “Investissements d’Avenir” (ANR-11-IDEX-0007) operated by the French National Research Agency (ANR).

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  1. Caroline Cretel, Naomi Duhau-Marmon, Isabelle Fournier, and Lucie Marignier contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire d’Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs, Université de Lyon, 5, avenue Pierre Mendès-France, 69676, Bron Cedex, France

    François Osiurak, Caroline Cretel, Naomi Duhau-Marmon, Isabelle Fournier, Lucie Marignier, Emmanuel De Oliveira, Jordan Navarro & Emanuelle Reynaud

  2. Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France

    François Osiurak & Jordan Navarro

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  1. François Osiurak
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Correspondence to François Osiurak.

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Osiurak, F., Cretel, C., Duhau-Marmon, N. et al. The Pedagogue, the Engineer, and the Friend. Hum Nat 31, 462–482 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-020-09379-0

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