Sublime

First, the babies engaged in social referencing, looking at one of the adults, four times more often, and more quickly, when an ambiguous toy was placed in front of them. That is, under uncertainty, they used cultural learning. This is precisely what an evolutionary approach predicts for when individuals should use cultural learning (see note 9). S

Our global success is due, at least in part, to a specific evolutionary trait: the ability to share attention with others.

Rather than opposing “cultural” with “evolutionary” or “biological” explanations, researchers have now developed a rich body of work showing how natural selection, acting on genes, has shaped our psychology in a manner that generates nongenetic evolutionary processes capable of producing complex cultural adaptations. Culture, and cultural evolution

Piaget, J. (2001) The Psychology of Intelligence. London: Routledge.

But evolution didn’t just lengthen childhood to make learning possible. It also installed three strong motivations to do things that make learning easy and likely: motivations for free play, attunement, and social learning.

This is why choosing an external system that forces us to deliberate practice and confronts us as much as possible with our lack of understanding or not-yet-learned information is such a smart move. We only have to make the conscious choice once.

There is, they suggested, a limit on the number of people we can feel sympathy for, and this seems to set a limit on other groupings where close psychological interaction is required.

The 150-layer is what you might call the wedding/bar mitzvah/funeral group

Bakke would often introduce AES’s management practices to the new group of colleagues by asking them what assumptions owners and managers of a typical factory hold about their workers.