Evolution Psychology · 23 March 2026 ·
Postnatal dependency as the foundation for social learning in humans
Human societies are built on sophisticated social learning abilities. Learning from others provides us with the ability to transmit information and knowledge faster and more adaptively than genetic transmission would allow us. This has provided humans with the ability to adapt to a wide variety of environmental niches and provides one of the most important aspects of our phenotype.
But where does this ability to engage in social learning come from? Many authors, such as Gergely Csibra and György Gergely have focussed on specific cognitive adaptations, such as the ability to understand communicative signals as markers of intentional communication. Others, such as Cecilia Heyes, have argued that these abilities are themselves the product of a process of social learning that provided its own foundations. In a recent publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological sciences, I argue that this ability instead emerges from human’s prolonged period of dependency after birth. This fundamentally reshapes the way that human infants explore their world: Rather than directly interacting with the affordances in the environment, human infants’ prolonged period of dependency creates an environment where they explore the world through others. Even compared to other apes, that share some aspects of this prolonged dependency, human infants spend more than twice as long until they have learned to walk. Once they have finally started to explore the world on their own, they have learned that the ‘[t]he path from object to child and from child to object passes through another person’ (Vygotsky, 1972), which provides the foundations for the complex social learning that we observe in humans. This provides an alternative explanation for human social learning, grounded in an embodied, enactive and ecological account of infant development.
The full paper is available open access and Richard Moore has written a nice commentary, highlighting some additional points.
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