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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Personality Affects Learning And Trade-Offs Between Private And Social Information In Guppies, Poecilia Reticulate, Larissa Trompf, Culum Brown
Personality Affects Learning And Trade-Offs Between Private And Social Information In Guppies, Poecilia Reticulate, Larissa Trompf, Culum Brown
Culum Brown, PhD
The acquisition of information such as the location and quality of food, mates or shelter is a key survival requirement for animals. Individuals can acquire information through personal experience (private information) or through observing and interacting with others (social information). Environmental spatial and temporal heterogeneity can mean that sometimes social information conflicts with private knowledge. We tested how personality affected the importance placed on public versus private information in wild female guppies when these two information sources came into conflict. We found that boldness and sociality affected decisions to use conflicting social and private information. Bolder females used social information …
Playing With Knives: The Socialization Of Self-Initiated Learners, David F. Lancy
Playing With Knives: The Socialization Of Self-Initiated Learners, David F. Lancy
David Lancy
Since Margaret Mead’s field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a range of societies. One improbable commonality has been the tolerance, even encouragement, of toddler behavior that is patently risky, such as playing with or attempting to use a sharp-edged tool. This laissez faire approach to socialization follows from a reliance on children as …
Teaching: Natural Or Cultural?, David F. Lancy
Teaching: Natural Or Cultural?, David F. Lancy
David Lancy
This chapter will argue that teaching, as we now understand the term, is historically and cross-culturally very rare. It appears to be unnecessary to transmit culture or to socialize children. Children are, on the other hand, primed by evolution to be avid observers, imitators, players and helpers—roles that reveal the profoundly autonomous and self-directed nature of culture acquisition (Lancy in press a). And yet, teaching is ubiquitous throughout the modern world—at least among the middle to upper class segment of the population. This ubiquity has led numerous scholars to argue for the universality and uniqueness of teaching as a characteristically …