How We Learn — and Who Gets Blamed

Humans are extremely reliant on social information and culture. It is how we have been so successful during our evolutionary history. The field of cultural evolution has for many years focused on social learning strategies – biases that influence when, what, and from whom individuals learn. During this talk, Robin will introduce some social learning strategies that have been considered in previous research, discuss what they mean for human social learning, and describe some of his recent work around deception.

Recent years have prompted increasing concerns that we are witnessing a ‘crisis of childhood’: gang violence and knife crime, mental health decline, social anxiety and a retreat into harmful digital worlds. This Pint of Science talk will lift the veil on how we care for our youth, and explore what lies beneath this apparent crisis, revealing the ‘care-washing’ tendencies evident within recent youth policy. It calls for a radical politics of care which reframes children and young people as the solution and not just the problem.