This review paper systematically queries the Sustainability Transitions literature to unpack the concept of ‘experimentation’. We define an experiment as an inclusive, practice-based and ...challenge-led initiative, which is designed to promote system innovation through social learning under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity. A distinction is made between various terms (niche experiments, bounded socio-technical experiments, transition experiments, sustainability experiments and grassroots experiments), each with their own theoretical backgrounds and discursive and empirical focal points. Observed patterns and trends in the literature are discussed, as well as promising lines of enquiry for further exploration of- and a reflection on experimenting for sustainability transitions in the context of the welfare state.
•‘Experimentation’ is a central concept in field of sustainability transitions.•Various types of experiments are identified and their genealogy is traced.•A comprehensive over-arching definition of an experiment is presented.•Critical reflection and a future research agenda on the study of experimentation are provided.
The present research seeks to explore how and when leader work engagement trickles down to the follower. Relying on social learning theory, we hypothesize that optimism mediates the relationship ...between leader work engagement and follower work engagement. Follower self-efficacy is supposed to strengthen the effect of follower optimism on work engagement. In a sample of 707 employees from 72 teams in Chinese enterprises, we tested the hypotheses using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). The results suggest that leader work engagement is positively related to follower work engagement and that follower optimism significantly mediates the relationship. Moreover, follower self-efficacy strengthens the positive relationship between follower optimism and work engagement as well as the indirect effect of leader work engagement on follower work engagement via follower optimism. Theoretical and practical implications are further discussed.
Consumers often consult the reviews of their peers before deciding whether to purchase a new experience good; however, their initial quality expectations are typically set by the product’s observable ...attributes. This paper focuses on the implications of social learning for a monopolist firm’s choice of product design. In our model, the firm’s design choice determines the product’s ex ante expected quality, and designs associated with (stochastically) higher quality incur higher costs of production. Consumers are forward-looking social learners, and may choose to strategically delay their purchase in anticipation of product reviews. In this setting, we find that the firm’s optimal policy differs significantly depending on the level of the ex ante quality uncertainty surrounding the product. In comparison to the case where there is no social learning, we show that (i) when the uncertainty is relatively low, the firm opts for a product of inferior design accompanied by a lower price, while (ii) when the uncertainty is high, the firm chooses a product of superior design accompanied by a higher price; interestingly, we find that the product’s expected quality decreases either in the absolute sense (in the former case), or relative to the product’s price (in the latter case). We further establish that, contrary to conventional knowledge, social learning can have an ex ante negative impact on the firm’s profit, in particular when the consumers are sufficiently forward-looking. Conversely, we find that the presence of social learning tends to be beneficial for the consumers only provided they are sufficiently forward-looking.
This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.
People make inferences about the trustworthiness of others based on their observed gaze behavior. Faces that consistently look toward a target location are rated as more trustworthy than those that ...look away from the target. Representations of trust are important for future interactions; yet little is known about how they are consolidated in long-term memory. Sleep facilitates memory consolidation for incidentally learned information and may therefore support the retention of trust representations. We investigated the consolidation of trust inferences across periods of sleep or wakefulness. In addition, we employed a memory cueing procedure (targeted memory reactivation TMR) in a bid to strengthen certain trust memories over others. We observed no difference in the retention of trust inferences following delays of sleep or wakefulness, and there was no effect of TMR in either condition. Interestingly, trust inferences remained stable 1 week after learning, irrespective of the initial postlearning delay. A second experiment showed that this implicit learning occurs despite participants' being unable to explicitly recall the gaze behavior of specific faces immediately after encoding. Together, these results suggest that gist-like, social inferences are formed at the time of learning without retaining the original episodic memory and thus do not benefit from offline consolidation through replay. We discuss our findings in the context of a novel framework whereby trust judgments reflect an efficient, powerful, and adaptable storage device for social information.
We study when and why perceptions of trustworthiness trickle down the organizational hierarchy to influence the performance of subordinates. Building on social learning theory, we argue that when ...supervisors perceive their managers as trustworthy, subordinates are more likely to also perceive their supervisor as trustworthy, which in turn enhances subordinate performance. We further argue that this trickle-down effect of trustworthiness perceptions emerges especially when the manager invites the supervisor to participate in decision-making. Finally, we propose that social learning processes that lead to supervisors exhibiting more trusting behavior toward their subordinates mediate this trickle-down effect. We find support for our predictions across one multisource field study (Study 1) and two experiments (Studies 2 and 3) that both use a yoked design. This research represents the first attempt to examine trickle-down effects related to trustworthiness, its impact on performance, and the mediating mechanisms by which those effects emerge. This research also provides the first empirical evidence about the role that social learning processes play in explaining trickle-down processes.
Conformity to the behavioural preferences of others can have powerful effects on intragroup behavioural homogeneity in humans, but evidence in animals remains minimal. In this study, we took ...advantage of circumstances in which individuals or pairs of captive chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, were ‘migrated’ between groups, to investigate whether immigrants would conform to a new dietary population preference experienced in the group they entered, an effect suggested by recent fieldwork. Such ‘migratory-minority’ chimpanzees were trained to avoid one of two differently coloured foods made unpalatable, before ‘migrating’ to, and then observing, a ‘local-majority’ group consume a different food colour. Both migratory-minority and local-majority chimpanzees displayed social learning, spending significantly more time consuming the previously unpalatable, but instead now edible, food, than did control chimpanzees who did not see immigrants eat this food, nor emigrate themselves. However, following the migration of migratory-minority chimpanzees, these control individuals and the local-majority chimpanzees tended to rely primarily upon personal information, consuming first the food they had earlier learned was palatable before sampling the alternative. Thus, chimpanzees did not engage in conformity in the context we tested; instead seeing others eat a previously unpalatable food led to socially learned and adaptive re-exploration of this now-safe option in both minority and majority participants.
•Conformity of immigrant chimpanzees to residents' new diet was tested.•Both migrants and immigrants displayed beneficial flexible social learning.•Immigrants did not conform by switching from their prior to residents' preferences.
Online environments, such as metaverses, provide distinct social environments for people to engage in complex, cognitive, and multidirectional learning and meaning-making experiences. These engaging ...and influential environments highlight important factors associated with the Social Learning Theory (a process through which external settings influence behavior in specific environments). According to this theory, environments provide a space for youth to engage in reciprocal interactions of interpersonal, behavioral, and environmental cues. Online environments designed by social media companies have been scrutinized, given their dependence on algorithms (artificial intelligence systems). Research has revealed the effects of systems that use machine learning to subversively maintain engagement on their platforms for as long as possible. Given the constant changes in socializing environments, younger generational cohorts need to be adequately prepared for systems that determine what type of content they are exposed to, and shape the timing, frequency, and agentic influencers they engage with. Therefore, this article proposes a necessity to expand our understanding about social learning and current technology design principles. This article demonstrates the need for a paradigm shift toward exploring an innovative construct referred to as the digital learning environment. We examine existing issues in the design of digital spaces, provide a positive developmental psychology framework that informs further research, and propose solutions for researchers, educators, policymakers, and caregivers as they navigate healthy technology use and predominant mental health issues in the 21st century.
Building on an in-depth study of 12 Bulgarian migrant entrepreneurial company cases in London, we illustrate how migrant entrepreneurs (MEs) interact with, and learn from, their exposure to a ...diaspora network. We demonstrate that learning processes need to be studied within the context where they occur as MEs adapt their modes of learning to contextual changes. We use social learning theory to offer a situated process model of learning, which shows why and how learning evolves over time, the learning modes MEs undergo (i.e. observational, participative, and exploratory learning), as well as the process configuration within which these learning modes are rooted. This article adds to the growing body of work showing the boundary conditions and the mechanisms through which MEs learn from networks when operating in a foreign market.
Social learning—the ability to learn from observing the decisions of other people and the outcomes of those decisions—is fundamental to human evolutionary and cultural success. The Internet now ...provides social evidence on an unprecedented scale. However, properly utilizing this evidence requires a capacity for statistical inference. We examined how people's interpretation of online review scores is influenced by the numbers of reviews—a potential indicator both of an item's popularity and of the precision of the average review score. Our task was designed to pit statistical information against social information. We modeled the behavior of an "intuitive statistician" using empirical prior information from millions of reviews posted on Amazon. com and then compared the model's predictions with the behavior of experimental participants. Under certain conditions, people preferred a product with more reviews to one with fewer reviews even though the statistical model indicated that the latter was likely to be of higher quality than the former. Overall, participants' judgments suggested that they failed to make meaningful statistical inferences.
When evaluating information, we cannot always rely on what has been presented as truth: Different sources might disagree with each other, and sometimes there may be no underlying truth. Accordingly, ...we must use other cues to evaluate information—perhaps the most salient of which is consensus. But what counts as consensus? Do we attend only to surface-level indications of consensus, or do we also probe deeper and consider why sources agree? Four experiments demonstrated that individuals evaluate consensus only superficially: Participants were equally confident in conclusions drawn from a true consensus (derived from independent primary sources) and a false consensus (derived from only one primary source). This phenomenon was robust, occurring even immediately after participants explicitly stated that a true consensus was more believable than a false consensus. This illusion of consensus reveals a powerful means by which misinformation may spread.
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