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This chapter begins with a brief review of the literature on social influences on food choices of Norway rats. It describes fieldwork strongly suggesting that interactions between adult free-living rats and their young can determine which foods the young come to eat. It then describes several behavioral processes that have been shown in the laboratory to be sufficient to influence food choice in young rats. Finally, it discusses a type of social influence on rats' food preferences that has already proved to be useful in studies of the physical substrates of learning and memory.

“Developing Learning Agile Behavior: A Model and Overview” focuses on how the development of learning agility creates a competitive advantage for leaders and their organizations. This chapter summarizes theories relevant to learning agility that have evolved over the past 50 years and the factors likely to influence learning agility development. An integrated learning agility model is proposed, the Learning Agile Process, consisting of (1) identifying the need for change, (2) planning for change, (3) implementing change, and (4) regulating and monitoring change. The model also outlines Learning Agile Behaviors that enable leaders to navigate this process: (1) observing, (2) doing, (3) connecting, (4) thinking, and (5) mobilizing. Thirty practical, learnable strategies for increasing learning agility are also provided. The chapter concludes with questions that remain to be answered in understanding the behaviors that contribute to agile learning.

During the 1950s and 1960s, researchers in Europe and the United States showed the difficulties inherent in the original ethological goal of studying animal behavior by first identifying an animal's instincts. This chapter reviews some of their major objections. Daniel Lehrman criticized the explanatory value of the concept of instinct and the impossibility of isolating innate behavior with deprivation experiments. Comparative psychologists Frank Beach, T. C. Schneirla, and Jay Rosenblatt stressed that isolation experiments cannot separate innate and learned behaviors. British animal researcher Robert Hinde exposed the weaknesses in Konrad Lorenz's hydraulic model of instinctual energy and the concept of drive.

This chapter provides an account of the so-called minimal rationality. Minimal rationality requires not only that behaviour be under the causal control of thought or another representational state, but that it be explained by the content of that representational state. An example of minimal rationality is the learned behaviour in animals. A foraging bird, for example, may avoid eating a harmless butterfly because it looks like a butterfly that the bird has learned tastes bad.

This book provides an actionable blueprint that makes use of science to build a leading-edge learning organization. More specifically, it explains how one can become a better and faster learner and how to create an organization that is more adaptable and learns better and faster than the competition. It thus examines the process of learning from an individual and an organizational standpoint. From an individual perspective, it considers the cognitive, emotional, motivational, attitudinal, and behavioral factors that promote better learning. Organizationally, it looks at the kinds of structures, culture, leadership, employee learning behaviors, and human resource policies that are necessary to create an environment that fosters critical and innovative thinking, learning conversations, and collaboration. The book takes an indepth look at three exemplary learning organizations and the lessons they offer: Bridgewater Associates LP, Intuit Inc., and United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS).

This chapter explains how learning to categorize people as male or female is part of the social repertoire of human beings, who start learning to do it in infancy. Human beings are predisposed to divide the world into male and female categories, but what goes into those categories varies from culture to culture and over time. We are, to some extent, able to choose which images, practices, ideas, and role models we use to build our individual gender identities. With a little more effort, we can teach each other to pay more attention to the things men and women have in common and by doing so make more room for non-stereotypical behaviour. If we do that, men and women may find it easier to pursue gender atypical occupations and jobs.

This chapter explores mid-level implicit needs and beliefs, lower-level implicit needs and beliefs, emotions, and other feeling states in relation to the cognitive-experiential theory (CET) of personality. It considers the action tendencies of primary emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, happiness and joy, love and affection, as well as the ancillary components of such emotions; primary emotions as nature's compromise between instinctive and learned behavior; secondary emotions; unresolved feeling states; and vibes. The chapter concludes by discussing the importance of feelings in CET.