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YOUR plane crashes and you find yourself stranded in the middle of a vast jungle. How would you work out which fruits are safe to eat and where to find clean water? You could muddle along on your own for a while, but you would probably end up sick and very hungry. Far better to find some friendly locals and learn how they do things.

Learning from others is something we do all the time, not just in extremis. We are more reliant on so-called “social learning” than any other animal – it is thought to be at the core of culture and tradition and is credited with our successful colonisation of the planet. Yet no one knows exactly how social learning works. Obviously, copying others allows us to acquire useful knowledge without having to bear the costs of working everything out for ourselves. But there is a catch. If societies are to adapt to changing conditions, there must be innovation too – people cannot blindly copy everything because the information may be wrong, outdated or unavailable.

This problem has occupied of the University of St Andrews, UK, for some time. “Individuals ought to be selective with respect to when they rely on social learning and from whom they learn,” he says. “Natural selection ought to have fashioned specific adaptive learning strategies.” But what are these strategies? If social learning is such a powerful force in our species’ success, surely we need to know when, where and why it happens. Yet previous attempts to answer these questions have only scratched the surface. Laland realised that if he was going…