| While those we learn from are often close to us, more and more our learning environments are shifting to include more distant and dissimilar others. The question I examine in six studies is how whom we learn from influences what we learn and how what we learn influences from whom we choose to learn it. In Study 1, I show that social learning, in and of itself, promotes higher level (more abstract) learning than does learning based on one's own direct experience. In Studies 2 and 3, I show that when people learn from and emulate others, they tend to do so at a higher level when learning from a distant model than from a near model. Studies 4 and 5 show that thinking about learning at a higher (compared to a lower) level leads individuals to expand the range of others that they will consider learning from. Study 6 shows that when given an actual choice, people prefer to learn low level information from near sources and high level information from distant sources. In Studies 7 and 8, I find that, contrary to my predictions, direct learners are better able to recognize the global consequences of a given action in a repeated choice task than are social learners. However, in these studies, I demonstrate that social learners do display a marked tendency to emulate the overall choices of someone that they observed completing a novel task. The goal of this research is to demonstrate a basic link between abstraction and psychological distance in social learning processes. |
