Individual and Social Aspects of Learning

Abstract

Social learning is in the air. Daily observations and experiences as well as recent scholarly traditions suggest that a certain amount of learning takes place beyond the confines of the individual mind. Learning appears to involve social aspects. Scenarios ranging from a group of children collaboratively trying to solve the question of how to construct a kite to a university professor writing a research paper with a colleague advance the case for a social side to learning. But impressions do not make social learning an obvious category. Are there any theoretical and empirical grounds to justify social learning as a distinctive phenomenon? Is there anything qualitatively different in this kind of learning to distinguish it from the familiar individual conception of learning? Can one make the case that social learning is more than an epiphenomenon or individual learning multiplied, that the social aspects of learning are anything more than the kind of secondary help a learner might get from audiovisual displays, bookmarks, and road signs? If we can raise the question of whether social learning is a valid and viable phenomenon, the opposite question might equally well be raised: Is it not possible that solo learning is simply a figment of the traditional laboratory-based psychology, on the one hand, and of a socially shared respect for the individual qua individual, on the other? The idea of social learning is not really new, having been an important part of early developments of the science of psychology (folkspsychology, as formulated, for example, by Munsterberg [1914, cited in Cole & Engestrom, 1993]). This branch of psychology fell into neglect because of its Gestalt-like nature and thus its alleged lack of rigor, its central phenomena left to anthropology and sociology to handle. It was distinguished from the more rigorous laboratory-based, experimentally oriented, and far more prestigious psychology of Ebbinghouse. Social learning has thus continued to be largely ignored by psychologists over the years, relegated at best to the study of background context, not really on a par with the learning of the individual (Gardner, 1985). This relative neglect now appears to have been corrected. With the growing interest in Vygotsky's theory, retrospective examinations of the role of social inter-