Speaker: Jennifer Cook, University of Birmingham

Host: Elliot Ludvig

Refreshments 3.30pm Common Room

Dominant individuals report high levels of self-sufficiency, self-esteem, and authoritarianism. The lay stereotype suggests that such individuals ignore information from others, preferring to make their own choices. However, the non-human animal literature presents a conflicting view, suggesting that dominant individuals are avid social learners, whereas subordinates focus on learning from private experience. In the first part of this talk I will discuss whether dominant humans are best characterised by the lay stereotype or the animal view of dominance. In the second part of this talk I turn my attention to the mechanisms that underpin social learning: Can it really be the case that a person can be good at social learning and, at the same time, poor at learning from their own private experience; and, if this is the case, does it follow that social and private learning are underpinned by dissociable neural mechanisms?