In today’s hybrid and remote work environments, understanding the social aspects of learning is essential for ensuring that important ideas and initiatives resonate and drive change at both individual and organizational levels. Social learning enhances knowledge retention and fosters lasting behavior change by activating key brain networks. Successful businesses harness the power of social context—whether in-person or in virtual settings—to boost attention, link new information to existing knowledge, spark insights, and make learning memorable through emotional engagement. Leaders and changemakers will gain practical insights on leveraging social learning to drive better performance and foster a culture of continuous improvement. Don’t miss this opportunity to transform your team’s development efforts, achieve lasting organizational change, and create a brighter, more connected future. Join Dr. Emma Sarro and Dr. David Rock as they dive into the latest research on the science of social learning in this episode of Your Brain at Work Live!
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Dr. David Rock: Hey, everyone, welcome welcome thanks for joining us.
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Dr. David Rock: I don't often kick these things off. But we're just celebrating
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Dr. David Rock: a million downloads of the podcast tied to this event, and it blew my mind so much. I wanted to do a kind of whole different session today, mix it up. So I'm I'm often interviewed today. I'm actually gonna do the interviewing and in a few minutes I'll be interviewing our head of research.
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Dr. David Rock: Emma, who has a Phd in neuroscience from Nyu and just doing a spectacular job.
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Dr. David Rock: Guiding our research?
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Dr. David Rock: So as we get settled in just can you put in the chat where you're calling in from, or watching from? Put in the chats. Nice to see? So the community that's here. Thanks, Chris. Have been 1st there, quick off the mark. We've got people from all over Minneapolis, Texas, New York, Lisbon, in Portugal.
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Dr. David Rock: Virginia, Seattle, Johannesburg, South Africa. Welcome, so it's just as you're coming up. Put in the chat where you're calling in from set your chat function to everyone. Make sure that when you make a comment, unless you particularly wanna comment to one person. But set your chat to everyone so everyone can see your comments. This is gonna be a little interactive. We're gonna do some science today. You probably have some questions.
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Dr. David Rock: I suspect it's a really fun topic. So we will do a little bit of a bit of interacting.
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Dr. David Rock: So yeah, let me bring Emma on, and then we'll we'll talk about the the topic but welcome, Emma. So, as I said, Emma heads up our research function. How long has it been, Emma? With us? Is it a year and a half? 2 years now.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Almost 3.
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Dr. David Rock: Almost 3 years. I'm like.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, wow, I know. Goes by fast.
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Dr. David Rock: Amazing, amazing and it's been a fantastic partnership. I really appreciate the rigor that you bring in the the depth of thinking. And
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Dr. David Rock: I'm I'm definitely less in the science. And I used to be, and more kind of thinking about impact and scale and all of that. So I really appreciate your commitment dedication to science. And really, you know, anchoring us there constantly. So folks, what we what we're gonna do today? We just we just like we've been talking a lot about organizational things. And I was like, I wanna get back to some science. I wanna like really dig into some of the things that that kind of inspire us all. And
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Dr. David Rock: there's a topic that's becoming more important. And it's that it's it's the topic of social learning.
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Dr. David Rock: or or how basically, how do you do learning? So it really really sticks and really becomes part of the fabric of people's lives and and and making learning social turns out to be a very, very fundamental variable for that in so many ways. And I'll I'll give. I'll give you a little bit of background context, sort of how we came to notice that. And then Emma's been doing a lot of research on
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Dr. David Rock: like the deeper neuroscience around this kind of why social matters, how it works in the brain, how to fine tune it. I think you'll find this really interesting for your own work. Many of you, I'm sure, design, you know, change and learning and leadership programs, or facilitate them or coaching all of that. So I think you'll find this really fascinating. But just, you know, by way of background, one of the interesting things I really noticed very, very early on. Maybe it was 2,000 2,003 was that
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Dr. David Rock: at the time we were training people in coaching, which is actually a pretty difficult thing to do to take someone who's relatively directive and sort of explanatory in their interactions with others and teach them how to sort of let go of solving problems and really help other people solve problems. But do that in a masterful way, where they actually solve problems better and faster with them without you. Right? So it's quite. It's quite a complicated thing to get people to that place because
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Dr. David Rock: you sort of teach them to ask questions, and they just ask questions about their own opinions. And there's a there's a bunch of insights that are quite deep to get people. And we we started out, you know, teaching this in person.
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Dr. David Rock: And for a bunch of reasons, we started doing virtual learning. And it was really fascinating to me that the virtual components of the learning, like when a few things were handled, were as powerful or more powerful than actually meeting in person. And it it didn't make a lot of sense.
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Dr. David Rock: And at some point, for a bunch of reasons, I think we had a major financial challenge in like the like. 2,003, 2,004. We said, we're actually gonna go all virtual for a year. And we ran the brain based coaching which we still run. It's had like 25,000 graduates now, and we ran this completely, virtually as an experiment, with no in person. And at the time we were like well, we think it could work.
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Dr. David Rock: It was amazing. We saw no difference in the quality of coaches coming out. And we had real data about that cause. We we would assess people. And we're like, how is that? You can be on a phone. And, by the way, this was, you know, the olden days, I'm that old where there were phones. No one was on a cell phone. People were on landlines and we could ask them to be in a landline. There was no platform right? It was a, you know, free teleconference.com, or something like that.
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Dr. David Rock: There was, you know, we would give people a workbook. But it was basically a phone bridge, right? Everyone would be off mute. No one would be allowed to mute. Had to be in a quiet place. And you but you could hear a PIN drop across 24 people.
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Dr. David Rock: And what what we found is that the conversations in many cases were deeper, more impactful, more real, and more like more meaningful to people than in person. We're like, that's so weird like, what is it that's going on? So that that was kind of a clue. And then we published the ages model in 2010 that that explained detention, generation, emotion, spacing. And then all this research started to come out.
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Dr. David Rock: We started working on that about 2,007. We published it 2010. And all this research started to come out about what was called social memory. And we started to see this research that memories can be stored in a way where social information is part of that memory network or not. Right? There's some information that's just completely disconnected from other humans in any way.
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Dr. David Rock: And some information is really connected to people. I connected to the people. You learned it from right. Or I learned that lesson from my dad, right? Or, you know. So so there's a type of memory called social memory. And we wrote about this in the ages update paper in 2012,
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Dr. David Rock: and it ended up that insight that one insight of how powerful Socialists ended up
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Dr. David Rock: having us completely change, how we deliver learning and designing, a way of doing, learning that we still do today, that we just never would have imagined without that insight. So it sort of was a really pivotal piece of research about social. But we haven't kind of come back to it in 12 years. So we're like, okay, let's let's dig deeper into what we've discovered
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Dr. David Rock: about social learning. But the the essence of it is, there's something that happens in the brain. When you you you make things social that that really changes, and I'll summarize it. Then we'll go to you another summary. The summary we sort of came to a few years ago. Was you encode more deeply, so essentially you're you're embedding it deeper in the brain. You recall more easily. So so you're able to, you know, remember, but and you also act more often.
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Dr. David Rock: and they're 3 slightly different things. Maybe we'll come back to that the end. But that's sort of as far as we got. But now we're gonna get into the deeper science. So Emma finally shut up. What do we mean by
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Dr. David Rock: what do we mean by social learning? 1st of all, let's let's kind of create a foundational definition.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Right? Right? Thanks for that. No, it's a great lead in, because we have been talking about it for a long time, and so we. We've known for a while that social learning and being in a social situation will enhance all of the outcomes. The experience is just richer, and so you can encode a lot deeper,
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Dr. Emma Sarro: and and I think and I'll cover some of the reasons why this is true. But now we really have an understanding of the neural foundations. For why like, why is this the case when you have a bunch of people together, either whether they're virtually or in the same room, because both of these can enhance learning that the group themselves, when they're kind of in sync together, will learn better. But social learning by definition is just the learning through observation of others. And so you can set this up in many different ways.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: But observing or imitating the behaviour
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Dr. Emma Sarro: and the definition. As we've understood, it has changed a bit over time. And there are many components you can imagine to this like, who are you learning from? When is it happening? Are you passively sitting there and taking it in? Or are you actively engaging in the experience? So there are all of these different ways and components, and we'll talk about them as kind of like recipe pieces or the minimal viable product. If you want to
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Dr. Emma Sarro: create kind of like a social engagement, a social learning kind of experience. But that's kind of the general definition of.
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Dr. David Rock: Give it to me in a short sentence. Give it to me, like, you know, in a in an instant. I don't know if you can do 7 words or less like we clarify.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: I know social learning is the is learning with by observing others.
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Dr. David Rock: Learning by observing others. Okay.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: And that was good. But you can break this up into into 3 main kinds of this. And this is gonna help us kind of de decide like design it right?
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, what are those 3 kinds? Tell us about the sort of the chunks I love that's in threes already. So tell us about the 3 kinds.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: I tried. So the 1st kind is just observational. And you can imagine what this is. You're just watching or listening. And important here is that the information is just flowing in one direction. It's from the teacher, or whoever sharing the information. And the learner. And that's that's very passive. So you're watching a recorded tutorial, or you're watching a lecture. And
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Dr. Emma Sarro: the second is imitation where you're still watching or listening to someone. And you're kind of imitating their behavior or what they're. So you're it's a little more active.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: But the information flow is just in one direction.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Now, I would say the 3rd type is the one we're really diving into. And that's the interactive learning. This is, I would say, true social learning where you're interacting with the other individual or others, it could be multiple. And there's a full taking turns of information. So you're sending information. The other person is sending information back. You're reacting. Everyone is taking turns, and it's a complete engagement of the whole group.
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Dr. David Rock: Right? So it's kind of observing, imitating, interacting. Is that right?
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, observing, imitating, and interacting. And and this is kind of increasing in the amount of engagement that the learner is experiencing. But with the 3.rd This was this is where everyone is engaging. And that's really important to some of like the research that that will say and that will cover.
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Dr. David Rock: So observing, imitating, interactive. 3, 3. And what you're saying is, there's social learning benefits at each level. But as you go up like they observe, there's social learning benefits at observing, but stronger benefits at imitating and even stronger and interacting got it.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah. And I would say that while you can learn at all of these levels, and you can even learn by reading a book. So we know that the learning processes happen. The brain areas are engaged. But the interactive learning, I would say, is a qualitatively different phenomenon that involves a whole different set of cognitive and physiological mechanisms.
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Dr. David Rock: Okay, well, let's yeah, let's dig into that. So I think we've all heard that thing and experience that thing of you know, you really wanna learn something. You teach it right? May. And that maybe that's an example of really deeply interacting learning. Right? It's maybe it's the 4th type. I don't know but th, there is something about really engaging with people. But tell us, what what does the research say about that that 3rd level, that interactive learning. I'll stop interrupting you. And you can talk about interacting.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: You can interrupt me. That's fine. The I would say. I would 1st say that a lot of what we're understanding now in this past decade is really due to the fact that we have so much better technology that can allow us to really understand what everyone in the room is what's happening, especially what's happening in their brain. So some of the research we're going to cover is
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Dr. Emma Sarro: this multi brain scanning or this hyper scanning technology where you can get a group of individuals in the room, and you can look at what's going on in their brains all the same time, which is amazing. And so this is what often happens with neuroscience. And while we've known for a while that social learning and social experiences are critical for outcomes. Now, we have, like the real research. To understand why and so waiting, sometimes waiting
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Dr. Emma Sarro: for the technology to catch up is is important.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: But there are some really interesting studies on the behavioral stuff like, what's happening when you when you have individuals, adults
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Dr. Emma Sarro: like learning and social situations. So, for example, you're learning a new language. There's 1 study that looked at basically what happens when you you ask individuals to learn a set of new words, either by an audio translation. So, reading the words and hearing the words versus just watching a social interaction on a screen. Of 2 people. Saying these words back and forth.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: and almost similarly to how a lot of parents are having their children learn new languages as they kind of like. Place them in front of a cartoon of a different language, and they start to learn what the what the words mean. What they found is that in that case, obviously it makes a lot of sense that those individuals that were watching the social interaction learned a lot faster. Their accuracy rates were better, and the engagement of
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Dr. Emma Sarro: the hippocampus and the motor areas. All the areas we know are important for learning. We're higher, higher, more highly engaged. So just that just watching the social interaction in this case they weren't even truly engaging in this.
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Dr. David Rock: That's really interesting. That's really interesting. So you're saying that 3rd level of even though it's is that the 3rd level? Or is that observing. And now I'm getting confused, is watching people interacting now, interacting social learning or still observing social learning. What do you think.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: That's a good question, I would say. It's imitating.
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Dr. David Rock: It's imitating right?
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Maybe watching and imitating if they're kind of imitating in in the motor areas are engaged a bit, but not truly like the highest level.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah. One thing I see.
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Dr. David Rock: Delivering a lot of talks. A lot for clients is a client, a company, will, you know? Bring me on. Say, like, you know, we want you to talk about. I don't know. Inclusion, and I'll say, look rather than me. Talk at people about inclusion. Why don't we have a conversation? People can watch right? Now, sometimes I do that because I just don't, wanna, you know, have to
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Dr. David Rock: present build a deck, and it's just sort of easier. But actually, the the main reason that that's better is watching 2 people have a conversation.
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Dr. David Rock: Is, I think, creates less of a threat response for people because they don't feel talked at. So they're not getting like a status threat of you're telling me I'm doing something wrong, or of autonomy threat of you're telling me what to do right? If so, if you if you're watching 2 people talking.
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Dr. David Rock: I I think your your your threat is lower, and you're more in a toward state right now, in that greater state you have more insight. And so so I think there's something to that. As much as possible. I try to do the sort of fireside chat format I still end up presenting the same content, but I do it in a way where people feel like I'm watching a conversation. And
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Dr. David Rock: i i i saw that for years I'd present something, and then the QA component would be so much more interesting to everyone, including me. So so there's something to that. But what you're saying is, it's not just that the threat is lower. It's that watching people interacting activates different brain functions and different brain processes. What what do we know about that? Do you know, dig into that a little bit more.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Okay, absolutely. So we know for sure that learning will activate all sorts of a areas like the hip campus, like your memory areas, all of those areas, sometimes emotional areas, if you're learning something that triggers an emotion. But when you're adding that social component, you're adding a whole other set of brain areas. We call it the social brain. So it's a huge set of areas, the default brain mode
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Dr. Emma Sarro: things like that. So now you've created this super rich experience that's now encoded in your brain as anytime. Anything in that experience is triggered again. The whole memory is triggered. So
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Dr. Emma Sarro: so obviously, then you're going to be able to remember that that moment and any piece of that moment much longer.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: And there's a lot of there's a lot of studies that show that, and actually another study that I found that actually really looks directly at the virtual components. So we often do our learning virtually. And this specific study looked at all of the different ways. You can make the virtual experience social. So a set of individuals watching, just watching a recording like a tutorial, a set of individuals watching an interaction.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: And then another set of individuals that were directly interacting with the online instructor, so similar to how you have a live facilitation, but virtually, and you can imagine that those that were interacting learned that material much better. But then also it was sustained for a week later, so the learning was longer as well.
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Dr. David Rock: That's really interesting. So what you're saying, there was a study that actually looked at these 3 types, right? Observational imitation interacting. They, they looked at it. What did they find? Was the differences? Is there any specific data you could share about those differences? And I think we'll we'll put the link in the chat for folks who worry. We we're gonna get. We're gonna get nerdy. Today. We're gonna talk about studies. We don't often dig into specific studies. But we're gonna get more nerdy today. So my team can put some of the links into to that one.
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Dr. David Rock: So yeah, thanks very much
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Dr. David Rock: and ages we can maybe explain ages. We've had a lot of. We've had a lot of events. We've been talking about ages, so we didn't bring it up here. But my team can put some of the relevant readings in there. It's attention, generation emotion, spacing. It's the the 4 4 elements that all need to be moderate to high for easy recall under pressure.
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Dr. David Rock: And that that's a measure we think is really important. If you're designing, you know, learning events today. If you're designing a learning event, you're generally designing something you want people to be sort of to become the habit cause you can just look stuff up if it's just information, or you can just look it up right? So if you're designing something you want as a habit you need easy recall under pressure.
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Dr. David Rock: and for that, working backwards you need pretty high to very high
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Dr. David Rock: attention, generation emotion, and spacing with regard to encoding tasks. And it turns out that interesting social kind of does all 4
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Dr. David Rock: but particularly interacting social, that 4th Level right? Because you're you're paying much more attention when you're interacting with someone than on your own right, you're generating connections when you're interacting with someone your emotions are higher interacting with someone. And then, if you continue to see that person, you'll reanimate the networks that you formed.
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Dr. David Rock: Right? So so in a sense, social creates really strong ages as well, so yeah, so so back to studies, we're talking about the study, that that showed kind of the difference in the 3. What kind of data did we find in there what? What came up.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Well, I know I can't actually remember exactly what they were teaching them, but it was the learning itself was so when they tested them immediately after the session, so those those that had that direct interaction recalled all of the information that was learned immediately, much better, and then they brought them back a week later.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: And so this was this was a study that actually didn't do any kind of like underlying neural data which we'll get into. But this was purely behavioral. But it does say something really interesting about when you're designing virtually if the facilitator is interacting with the the group, whether it's 1 on one, or whether it's in a group like that has the benefits, and I think ages is necessarily integrated into all of that.
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Dr. David Rock: Right? So the headline is, get interacting get interacting. And thanks folks putting chats. And you know, comments in the chat, love, those keep those coming. It's a Ca, it's a type of interaction. Your brain will wonder if it's gonna be seen and then get a little delight when the comments seen. And yeah, so definitely let's interact in the chat about this. So so let's dig deeper. What? What do we know about what's happening in the brain.
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Dr. David Rock: And sort of how do we think about what's happening in the brain, particularly in that? Well, I guess in all 3, but particularly in that interacting level you mentioned the word synchrony. Can you? Can you talk us through that and kind of take us a couple of clicks into that.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, yeah, this is the stuff that I really love. And actually, this is the stuff that's most interesting right now, and is totally dependent on the fact that we have the technology that we can do this now. So I'll just give you the takeaway is basically that when you have a group of people together, and their brains are in sync
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Dr. Emma Sarro: their learning outcomes are going to be better. So when the group is in sync, then you can take an individual, and what they've learned is better, which is just kind of a fascinating result. That means the group has to be aligned, focused on the same thing. And a lot of this has come from being able to record the electrical activity of multiple people at the same time.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: in the learning situation moment to moment learning, which is really fascinating. So it's what we call hyper scanning Eeg. It's this new kind of technology you're basically putting like an electrical reading cap on, and you're letting them learn. And one of the pieces of this. I'm getting a little bit click deep in here. One of the pieces of this is something we call an alpha wave. It's just a kind of waveform.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: And when that waveform is in sync, we often think that's related to attention. And so the group is highly focused on each other and on the topic. And this also involves the teacher, which I think is amazing in a lot of these situations. The teacher is also part of this group. So they're all focused on each other.
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Dr. David Rock: Interesting. Yeah, someone's asking about in sync, we don't mean the band.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Okay.
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Dr. David Rock: But it's funny how the brain creates connections. And we there's there's a thing called neural synchrony which is essentially like you imagine 2 violins near each other, and you play an A on one violin. The other violin actually plays like like resonates with the same note? Interestingly. So it's it's a kind of synchrony. So synchrony is like in some ways. My my Luddite brain understands it is 2 brains kind of like humming at a similar frequency. Similar brain networks, active?
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Dr. David Rock: and and they're starting synchrony. Now, now, is this similar or different to fnas, which is which is a really interesting new technology. So the the technology you're you're talking about is it the same or different as effneas? Folks might have heard.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: I'm actually not quite sure about the details of that. But this is the the Eegs are a bit more surface level, and the benefit of them is that they're super temporal, resolute, meaning that you can study moment to moment exactly what they're learning. What was the context of that sentence, and what was happening in the brains right then. And that's the benefit of that.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: And the studies are fascinating, because what they've actually shown is that you can have a group of 5 recording at the same time teacher and students, and moment to moment recall is best when they're most in sync both at time and even a week later. So this is highly related to that, like direct interaction and sustained learning.
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Dr. David Rock: So synchrony is correlating to easy recall under pressure.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Amazing.
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Dr. David Rock: Okay, so what do we know about synchrony in the brain during learning like, what brain regions are engaged like, what does what does it look like, or is it any brain region? And it's just synchronized. What? What do we know.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, so what you can really tell from this kind of data is really just that, like large scale brain areas are kind of in sync. And what you can imagine is a lot of the brain regions are kind of focused on the same concept. We think this is associated with like attention. So when their attention is highest, all at the same time, they're probably focused on each other and on the content.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: And actually, one study looked at 12 individuals. So I know somebody asked about the group size? They've even studied this in a group size of like 12 students over the course of like a biology, a set of biology lectures.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: and they found that the days when individuals were most engaged and focused on the content, regardless of the teaching style. So the teaching style might have changed
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Dr. Emma Sarro: the the out. The most synchrony happened when everyone was focused and engaged on the same day.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: So it's just amazing that sometimes it might depend your outcome as an individual might depend on how in sync the group is together.
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Dr. David Rock: It's not so much about like one particular brain region being in sync. It's it's about the quality of attention. You're saying that when everyone's attention is focused on the same thing, so their attention could be focused on a memory right or their attention could be focused on an external stimuli or their attention could be focused on a, you know, a sound.
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Dr. David Rock: But it's but basically it's their attention is focused on the same thing. And it could be any kind of different brain network. It's about a correlation of attention in a way. What? What do you think happens? What do they know about what happens when attention is synchronized like that? What? What are some of the downstream effects.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Well, the downstream effects will absolutely be that the brain areas that are needed for forming new connections. So like the hippocampus with the emotional brain areas and all the memory networks that you're forming, you're more likely just to form better synapses, better connections. And we know that the the best memories are those that have the strongest connection. So if you that the old statement, if you wire together, you fire together.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: so the more often and the strongest. These these connections are kind of like firing together at the same time, the more likely you're gonna form that really strong connection. And having.
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Dr. David Rock: I actually just think you had a massive breakthrough without noticing it. The same. The statement is actually cells that fire together wire together. I think.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Oh, that's right.
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Dr. David Rock: Invented humans that you just invented humans that fire together wired together.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah.
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Dr. David Rock: Congratulations on coining a coining, a phrase. Humans that fire together wire together.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Recorded.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, I'm writing it down. I'm gonna yeah.
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Dr. David Rock: I'm
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Dr. David Rock: there you go. So it's it's interesting. You you you heard it 1st from Emma. Humans that fire together wired together. So it's it's it's it's an attention. So it's almost like when you're paying attention to something. The attention has a certain intensity. But when you're paying attention to something, and other people are paying attention to it as well, the intensity.
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Dr. David Rock: the the attention, density itself is stronger, like the amount of attention is strong because others are as well. And this explains, I guess you know this explains a lot of things like watching a recorded webinar is so much less effective than being there live, even though you might just be watching it. But you're you're sensing other people watching at the same time. Right? So there's a there's a term. Attention, density I haven't used it for a long time, but when when I was working with Jeffrey Schwartz
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Dr. David Rock: years ago, when we we wrote the neuroscience of leadership, the 1st paper on the space, and he helped me with your brain at work when I was working with Jeffrey he he talked a lot about attention, density, and we started to give it metrics. And essentially it's the intensity
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Dr. David Rock: of attention multiplied by the the time that you're spending so so you could have, like, you know, over a day, you could have like very high attention, density, but it might be in 5 seconds. Bursts. You know, many, many times that might be much more effective than you know, spending an hour on something that that way, vaguely paying attention. So attention, density seems to be increased.
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Dr. David Rock: Basically, when other people are paying attention to the same thing, you're all kind of really, really focused on it. That's really interesting.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The I mean. And that's 1 of the one of the reasons why social learning is so effective is that we are so sensitive to the, to the, to the group, and especially if it's a group. And we'll talk a bit about this, but especially if the group is kind of your team. You're in group. You have this social relatedness between them.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: that social closeness. And there's actually research that shows this, that the the as the social closeness between like a student and a teacher, for instance, increases. So you can imagine this between like you and your teammate. As that becomes stronger. You have a greater chance of becoming in sync in your like, your neural activity. So it just makes the process even easier.
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Dr. David Rock: That's so fun. I have to tell you a funny thing. Emma reaches out to me sometimes. Says I found this fantastic research. I wanna talk to you about it. And today this was one of those examples where I said, Great, let's talk about it with an audience. Because lots of people paying attention will make this even more interesting to both of us. And that's what's happening. So this is, this is, you know, my ulterior motive is, I really wanted to unpack this research, and we said, Let's do it with more attention. So that's very, very meta right there. But what I'm saying is observational, imitational and interactive
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Dr. David Rock: social learning. Basically, as you go up, you're increasing the attention density. I, that's kind of what's happening. And that. And that's that attention. Density is is one of the elements of ages. So you're really increasing the attention. And you'd have to imagine emotional impact is going up a lot
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Dr. David Rock: as you're as you're going from observational to interaction, right? Because there's stakes when you're interacting. So emotions going up
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Dr. David Rock: and and attention so, and and probably generation as well, because you're you. I don't know if they've studied this, but I know when you think about an idea and then speak about it with someone.
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Dr. David Rock: When you speak it out loud. It's like you. You process it differently. The way I've I don't think anyone studied this directly. Maybe they have. But the way I've always understood it is the concept of spreading activation which is a neuroscience term. And essentially, you know, you think an idea you might have a million neurons involved. But when you speak it now, you've got billions of neurons involved, so that the network for the idea is more robust, and as a result it can connect to other things that wouldn't have connected to more. So
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Dr. David Rock: so speaking to others versus just thinking. It enables you to to like bridge connections you wouldn't have made because that core network is stronger. So so to me, social also is increasing. The this spreading activation of ideas in your own brain. So now we're at attention, generation and emotion.
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Dr. David Rock: Across the board. So let's yeah. So so back to you. Let's let's get practical. So what do we know? You know, we know we know it's a lot about attentions, a lot about synchrony. What do we know about like really making something social? What do we know about? Kind of from from the research? What have we known about that.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, they're definitely like the baseline of what do you need to learn in general? Right? You need like the the normal things like attention, motivation. You need like a bit of social arousal, or like you're engaged with this group. You need you need the why of why am I here? The importance of this for me? So some of that comes from just being in a social group. But then there's also the
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Dr. Emma Sarro: like, how are you connecting with this individual? Are you able to read their queues? So are you seeing their face, their social queues? Because a lot of the. And you were mentioning this before as you're talking when you talk about an idea, you're engaging more of your brain because you're talking about it to somebody else. But then also, you're taking a bit of perspective of this person. You're you're
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Dr. Emma Sarro: you. You understand this person and their expectations a bit. And that is gonna change how you're explaining something. So if you're talking to avoid, and you're just recording yourself, you have no idea of the audience that's in the room, but that will having an audience. You're talking to one person.
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Dr. David Rock: Right.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: And take that into account, too. So that changes the message. And then their feedback changes what you understand about it. And so it's this constant, this back and forth of information that involves this super rich social environment. So the more that you have, whether you see their face or just their hands, whether it's live or recorded, all of those things matter?
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Dr. Emma Sarro: But then all of the group dynamics, too. So are you attending to the same thing are you? Do you have like a common ground, or like a set of social expectations of this group, so like within a team, do you have? Are you able to take perspectives of the others? Is there a sense of relatedness? Is there a shared goal?
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah. So all of these things are so important for just building a team. And you can imagine, if you have a team and you're learning together, you might have all of those things in place. So you can imagine that the learning that you do together might even be fostered.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, you've got me thinking about something. So it will take some questions in a minute. I think if you wanna have a quick look through the questions and some things that jump out to you. But just what what you're reminding me of is some research we did a few years ago on like kind of
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Dr. David Rock: we. We dug a couple of clicks deeper into the effects of diverse teams and and th those diverse teams had to be inclusive to get these benefits. But when the team was diverse and inclusive, you you had you. You basically had a higher team, IQ, and we published this in Hbr in a piece called Why, Diverse Teams are smarter.
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Dr. David Rock: So you have this higher team, IQ, which can be measured. And it's, you know, stable across time for a team
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Dr. David Rock: as long as you had diversity and inclusion. But what was interesting, we dug into the mechanism of that at 1 point to try to understand like, well, exactly how does this happen? And I'm starting to see some parallels. And we we saw this, a whole body of research on what's called cognitive elaboration.
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Dr. David Rock: And we wrote a piece on this, my team can maybe dig it up. So cognitive elaboration is like a click deeper into why, diverse teams are actually smarter and essentially, it's that you work harder to explain yourself to quite different brains. If you have different brains there, like, if you have people who just, you know, group think like you, you have people who think like you, you're, you know, when you explain something. You just explain it one way, the way you always have.
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Dr. David Rock: add a different person, maybe a brand new person to your company. You've got to cognitively elaborate your idea. Now you've got to like work harder to explain it the way a new person would understand it. Now add a person from a completely different socioeconomic construct. Now add a person who speaks a second language, and wow! That was fast. 7. Thanks, and now you're now you're you're really having to elaborate. And what happens is you're basically putting in much more effort.
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Dr. David Rock: And as a result of that effort is that you see more flaws in the thinking you, you explain it better. And then there's the second half of that cognitive collaboration. Is people challenging more? Right? So provided there's psychological safety in that group setting, you get really rich cognitive elaboration
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Dr. David Rock: which is essentially sort of breaking down ideas and really working on them together. And that's that's what happened. So I guess in a learn in social learning, the same kind of thing is happening. That's 1 of the elements that's happening is you're getting that cognitive collaboration
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Dr. David Rock: in good social learning, where there's space to debate and argue and and sort of really, you know, really challenge each other as well. What what do you think about that.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, no, such a great point. The and you can just imagine because what everyone brings to the table is as long as everyone feels that they are included and able to speak up. Then everyone brings all of these social expectations. These experiences cause they're all part of our memories. And what we've learned, and you know, just in in terms of like what it, what it applies to applies to all kinds of learning, whether you're learning how to do something like a process, whether you're learning
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Dr. Emma Sarro: like. You know, an idea or some kind of just like general knowledge. It's definitely it. It applies to all of that, because you're forming a network. And so the the more rich your network is.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: then the better you understand a concept. And so and this kind of comes up when you're when you're teaching, too. I mean when you, when you're teaching something you're you're learning because you have to understand, like what level individuals are coming in at. What is their experience?
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Starting from scratch forces you to go through like the foundations of the context and explain it, maybe for the 1st time, maybe even if you didn't understand the foundation from the beginning, you just understood the outcomes that you have to go from from the beginning, and it absolutely ties to psych safety. For sure.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, interesting.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Be part of that. Yeah.
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Dr. David Rock: I. I have some questions for you, but I'm gonna be more inclusive and and ask some questions from the group. There's a couple of questions jumping out. That we can maybe both discuss one from Bonnie talking about mandatory versus voluntary learning. Right? She's saying, you know, experience mandatory is less desirable. We actually wrote a piece on this, as it relates to Dei training, showing fairly conclusively that that mandatory di training probably makes things worse, and that you just don't want to do it. We wrote a pretty significant piece in strategy and business
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Dr. David Rock: years ago. My team can put in, and and you know the cliff note. There is the the sort of autonomy threat people feel like you're being told they have to do something. And the status threat like, Oh, you're broken. You need this class, and
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Dr. David Rock: particularly in the Ei space. Very few people feel, you know, have a felt sense that they're doing something wrong with the Ei. When they feel blamed they they get defensive. So. But it's not just that space, and I guess
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Dr. David Rock: the more people are told they have to do something the less social the learning will be, the less they'll speak up, the less they'll challenge each other. How would you process that mandatory versus we talk about mandatory versus compelling learning. So we try to create compelling, not just mandatory. But what are your thoughts on that.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: I mean you. Could. You could think about it in so many ways. I mean we you could even bring scarf into this as well, I mean having the like, the the engagement. So this maybe relates to like the general arousal or the saliency of the experience that you're you're interested in it. You're motivated by it. You won't feel any of those things if you feel like you're being forced against you know your will towards something you lose that sense. You're in it kind of in a state of
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Dr. Emma Sarro: threat or avoidance. So you just won't be able to learn. And that just puts a big barrier.
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Dr. David Rock: So that that gets to a point from Wendy. And in fact, we thought about this a few years ago. It was the summit. I don't know. Maybe 3 or 4 years ago we did a quick kind of touch in on social learning, and that's where we came up with encode more deeply, recall more easily act more often. We released that maybe 3 or 4 summits ago. But I I remember at the time that some of our researches. I think it was Cami who was with us for a few years, actually challenged that thinking and said, Look, social learning isn't good. Actually, social learning can be bad.
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Dr. David Rock: If if you don't have the right social environment. So if you have, you know, like, there are situations where social learning could be worse than non-social learning. But you know, learning on your own might be better than social. And and if, for example, people feel bullied by people in the classroom, right? They probably learn better on their own.
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Dr. David Rock: That's an obtuse example. But
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Dr. David Rock: there definitely are situations where social learning.
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Dr. David Rock: you know, won't make learning better. So there's a
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Dr. David Rock: there's a kind of proviso here that you know, like you know, social learning with good psychological safety, or, you know, social learning, and with a positive environment increases ages. But it might actually decrease ages. If the social isn't managed the right way. So I think that that's an important kind of call out, any any any questions?
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Dr. David Rock: I think you wanna jump into there as well.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: No, that makes yeah, that makes a lot. I think that's a great point. And I think that requires us to think about the environment that we're setting up, and who is who who is sharing the information? And you know it also relates. And something that's coming up to me is the is like just the different kinds of like learning platforms. I mean, we've been talking about like virtual sessions and having, like a live facilitator. But this
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Dr. Emma Sarro: kind of learning can also happen on something like social media, too. It's the same idea is that you are learning from each other. It might be asynchronously. But you're engaging. You're responding. You're you're seeing other kinds of reactions. And one of the reasons why those kinds of platforms are so interesting for individuals and engaging is because they're able to see the social feedback from something that they're sharing the information that they're sharing.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: and maybe one of the benefits of those kinds of social learning platforms is that the information is, is there forever. So it's not contained within a room of whoever's included in this room at this time in everyone can jump into this social platform at any time and see the information, learn it, react to it. So it's kind of continuous. So there are benefits of having a platform where you're learning asynchronously as well, and that can that can kind of like boost learning in a different way. You might not have the visual
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Dr. Emma Sarro: reactions, but you have, like some of the social reactions, the.
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Dr. David Rock: Mushroom.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Trends.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, let's let's get into that. I just put in a chat my team put in the chat a link to one of the events that we did on this. But I also put the strategy and business piece took me a minute to remember the title. It's a couple of years old. But is your company's diversity training making you more biased? Was the piece. And it's it's a really important piece, based on some other research that came out at the time about just really don't make learning mandatory. That's the clip note. Don't make learning mandatory. And then, rather than just make it like, you know, voluntary, which isn't great. Right? What you want to do is make it compelling.
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Dr. David Rock: And and really really think about what makes learning compelling. We ran some summit sessions on this over the years like, how do you get from mandatory to compelling? And what's that look like? And I think it's a really, it continues to be a really important piece of work.
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Dr. David Rock: Alright! What other questions we got here? Some fun questions folks put your questions in, or comments or insights. All really interesting. Let me see if there's some other ones I've otherwise, maybe let's go to sort of what you started talking about what? What's? I'm curious about this. And what's the minimum viable product?
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Dr. David Rock: for making social learning and and maybe for interactional social learning? Right? That 3rd piece.
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Dr. David Rock: Observational imitation. What's that? Therapies?
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Dr. David Rock: What's the What's the minimum viable product to make that work.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, I mean, I think I think there's there are a number of things. And and and as some of the studies that we showed there are different levels. And you're always going to get maybe enhanced and longer lasting learning. If there's some social components. So we even saw with some of those studies. Just watching social interactions is is beneficial because there are people engaging.
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Dr. David Rock: Nice.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Reactions and stuff. So maybe it's watching social interactions. If someone is more of an introvert and they don't actually want to engage themselves, they can watch that, or maybe asynchronously engaging in a conversation where they're able to think and then respond and then share their emotional reaction and then see others responding the next day. So those like social platforms as well. So I think the ability to
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Dr. Emma Sarro: see, like a bi-directional information flow like, share your information, get some reaction to that from somebody else. So then you can change your perspective, and then.
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Dr. David Rock: Right.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: That back and forth like taking turns, I would say, is like the most minimal. Yeah, I would say, so, yeah.
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Dr. David Rock: And so so can that be asynchronous? Does that have to be real time, or can it be asynchronous.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, I absolutely can be asynchronous. I send. And we've been experimenting with this itself. But that's what I was saying about the social media in a way like that's asynchronous. And it can be very engaging. And have. You can form these networks with individuals by jumping back in reacting, seeing how people react to your information and how you've shared it. And having debates that way, you can learn pretty richly in those environments.
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Dr. David Rock: I was just flashing on a scene from a show I've been watching lately called louder milk, which is a kind of crazy like one of those shows where people aren't like being shot and dying and like. So it's not stressful. You can watch it to unwind, you know, but it's actually about an Aa coach who's working with a group of misfits. And it's just like a nice, relatively easy, funny. But in one scene, there's a basically the the group, the AI group, had been causing some noise
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Dr. David Rock: in the neighborhood. And one of the group goes online and starts interacting with the the sort of people who are complaining and just just blows everything up. And suddenly there's like people picketing. And just, you know, so like PE people clearly can get worked up like can have strong emotions right, and pay high attention
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Dr. David Rock: right in asynchronous communication.
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Dr. David Rock: And you see that with the sort of flaming effect. So it's a, it's a, it's a really funny situation. So yeah, we've been experimenting with that. And you know, we we've we've always held really, really, really firm to the fact that we're not a content organization, that we're we're. We're a change organization, you know, we started in coaching. And and now we're in organizational change. But we're we're in the behavior change business, not the sort of content business right? And
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Dr. David Rock: and we really, we really waited a long time to to go more digital. Our distributed learning solutions are, you know, very, very scalable, but not completely digital
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Dr. David Rock: but this new platform we've built. Some of you will have heard of this. The habit activation platform is is a completely new type of learning platform. And it's it's as different to a normal Lms is as an Lms is to like just Powerpoint and and essentially, what we've what we're betting on is that you can get really strong social activation.
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Dr. David Rock: If if you ask if you're getting people to interact about the right kinds of things like about the quality of their insights or about the actions that they're planning to take and and, you know, committing to those kinds of actions. So this the certain conversations you can get people to have asynchronously, you know, on a platform that will engage them. And it's not just the sort of you know, competitive stuff it's it's more about sort of sharing insights, sharing learning.
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Dr. David Rock: But this, this nuance is the way to do that. So we're we're doing this experiment. Can we do something really asynchronously. That makes it social but also creates insight, you know, over time, and you know we've launched our 1st solution in the hap called lead my team can put that in. But we're also gonna be putting all of our major solutions as a 30 day sprint in in this platform. So we're we're making a bet that
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Dr. David Rock: we can do completely digital learning. That's more powerful than putting people in a workshop.
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Dr. David Rock: So we're picturing a thirty-day very asynchronous, like about an hour of experience over a month.
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Dr. David Rock: You know, spread over a month that that's gonna be better than putting them in a 1 day classroom for behavior change. And we're starting to get some data on that. But it's it's a crazy idea. And certainly most digital learning doesn't do anything like that. But we think by following the science of insight and the following, the science of social, that's gonna be possible.
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Dr. David Rock: So yeah, my team could put a link that we've opened lead to the public so you can actually register and and do the 6 month lead program
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Dr. David Rock: on online, and you know, start to experience that and my team can put them in the chat. So anyway, so so minimum viable product is really sort of feeling like you're interacting with another person, but doesn't have to be real time, right? Feeling like that. They're there and feeling like something matters. And there are other people there. In in the process.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, I would say so. I mean you, you know, like we said before, you can absolutely learn in in like a unidirectional information, reading a book or listening to a lecture, but seeing how people react to your information and your answers, and and having that back and forth, will change your brain in totally different ways. It's just a totally different phenomenon, and it can lead to just like a more sustainable learning.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, and that's interactive. That's that's interactional level. That's not observational limitation. You can actually have an interactional level of social learning.
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Dr. David Rock: But I think it has to be. There has to be some stakes in in in those interactions, not just a thumbs up on. You know, there has to be some kind of, you know. Stakes in that
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Dr. Emma Sarro: I would say. I mean, you can absolutely respond with a thumbs up. But I think the learning will be a lot richer if you are sharing, how you feel like, what is your experience with what someone shared? What did that make you think of? You know there's a bit of that Meta cognition and sharing experiences that will just increase the overall learning.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Right? You get that like richer experience.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, yeah, interesting. Let's thanks for the comments well, like, thanks for the comments here, a couple more questions. Then we'll wrap up. But I I you know Bonnie's question. The It department has a soap opera type of training to try to make their mandatory training more compelling. I don't know. It's it's it's making us Nick taste better, you know
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Dr. David Rock: better for you, or is it just? Still, you know, I I don't know. I I think, attempts to make really mandatory things, you know, vaguely funny. Maybe hits a few people once it's it's it's like those.
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Dr. David Rock: The problem is, you gotta keep doing it differently, like
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Dr. David Rock: I think about the safety. You know, briefings on airplanes right? Like, if you go to sometimes an airline will do a really clever one, and the 1st time you see it it's great, and then but you have to see it like 19 more times before you see a new one, and you just so over it. So I I don't know. I think just
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Dr. David Rock: don't make it mandatory and find other ways to get the message out. That's more compelling, or keep it as short as possible and as as fluent as possible versus try to make it, you know, bells and whistles. That would be that would be my sense. So yeah. So what what else is coming up for for you in the questions? We'll we'll take one or 2 more, and then we'll we'll wrap up.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, I'm well, yeah. The the questions have been, have been amazing. There's a lot going on here. But yeah, there's some great questions on, you know, level of like interaction, that an individual, you know, we we all have different levels of like social arousal that we can really handle and want right? So I think that, you know, making the variety of this kind of interaction, it doesn't always have to look the same
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Dr. Emma Sarro: right? And so you can. You can do that, asynchronous learning, and get kind of the benefit, or you can jump into a a live session with you know, in the same room and have all of this rich discussion. So there are definitely differences right? And it can be a group of 2 or a group of 20. So you can also change. You can also get this rich outcome from just working with someone new and sharing new. Yeah.
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Dr. David Rock: Interesting. Yeah, really interesting. All right, a couple of really quick announcements that we're going to let people drop. If my team has a poll. Let's throw that up now a couple of quick announcements. Speaking of social learning, the summit is planned
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Dr. David Rock: and hold the dates. 29th and 30th of October. We are doing it virtually, but it's going to be highly interactive. You're going to get benefits.
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Dr. David Rock: Hopefully, we'll be back to in person next year. But we we want to do a really different idea this year. We experiment every year. We're doing pretty much around the clock
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Dr. David Rock: for 2 or 3 days, cause. We're doing a live version in North America, a live version in a Mia. And a live version in Apac with a lot of crossover all at the same time. If Emma looks like she's crying right now, that's because she's managing that it's gonna be very social. But the math of that is, I have a hypothesis that we're not built for time zones. Very well. But anyway, so so we're doing kind of around the clock for 2 or 3 days, depending on how you define day.
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Dr. David Rock: you know, in 2930th of October, and the amazing thing about virtual is, we can have exactly the right scientists and presenters there.
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Dr. David Rock: So 29th and 30, th even though you met, you're not certain you could be there. Try to keep your calendar open as much as you can for that we had an amazing group. The other thing with that is, if you've got, you know folks in your organization. It's quite cheap to get there under $500, and you can get a whole team of people there along or get your company to buy corporate membership, so you can get a bunch of folks along and get access to tons of resources. It's a good time to to do that. So the summit is coming up.
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Dr. David Rock: And we've got. Yeah, we've got lots of things. You're really interested in the science, the certificate in foundations of neuro leadership is A is a much loved program. We're doing that 3 times a year. Now, it's a 6 month online course to really dig deep as an individual practitioner into the science. It's a really phenomenal program.
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Dr. David Rock: And the other thing is the the brain based coaching roughly once a month. We're we're kicking off that as well. I think yeah, lead is exciting. We we're you can now join that anytime and start anytime. We are seeing some early data, some early results from that. That's that's exciting. But we're not ready to publish
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Dr. David Rock: but you can jump into a lead and other things there. Just, Emma. Thanks so much for being here. I think we're gonna have to do this again where I ask you questions? Let's let's let's ask everyone. Let's make this interactive learning.
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Dr. David Rock: And what topics would you like to hear more about in for on the science. Let's get some ideas in the chat from the 173 of you still here. What topics would you like to hear more about. And as as you're thinking, I'll just remind you, we also just released the white paper on Niles which my team can throw in the chat a link to that. But we just released the Niles white paper. Which is about our amazing AI work. Thanks Paula for being 1st
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Dr. David Rock: coaching people. And so yeah, let's get in the chat. Some topics. You'd like us to dig into the science of more.
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Dr. David Rock: and yeah, you want the white paper. Put it, put white paper in the chat.
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Dr. David Rock: learning in the context of adversarial relationships. That's an easy one.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: We're gonna be covering a lot of performance management at the summit, too.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, yeah, we've we've got a lot on on performance management for sure. Coming up. I think we we're digging more into that. So yeah, any topics you want to dig into the science of more AI and neuroplasticity, we haven't done an update on basically how attention changes the brain for a long time. It's a really interesting one, is. There's new studies on that and attention neuroplasticity. That's kind of a foundational one. I think it's really important.
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Dr. David Rock: solicitor saying the healthy mind platter on what we're seeing, what's new in that. That's a good one.
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Dr. David Rock: leaders in their blind spots that's lots to talk about. There. Excellent! Give folks another minute to do that. See if you can have any any insights about topics that would be really interesting to you. And I think I know, can people like others? So maybe I don't know if you can in this platform or not.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Not sure if it's this platform.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, yeah, it's a shame it'd be nice to to to get some quick votes on that.
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Dr. David Rock: But performance management neurodiversity
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Dr. David Rock: all right. Fantastic. So lots of great comments, Emma, thanks so much for being here, and thanks for messaging me a month or so ago, and saying all this amazing research coming out about social learning and taking my challenge, that we don't talk about it until we have an audience. And I love what we found. I think these 3 types of learning, of social learning really important, observational, invitational, interactional
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Dr. David Rock: understanding that it's attention, density, that's the active ingredient. It's really, really helpful. And then even clicking further into that about sort of what creates the attention, density, cognitive elaboration, and other things. So yeah, really, great conversation. Thanks everyone for being here. This will go up on the podcast in the next couple of weeks, lots of great sessions on the podcast if you haven't seen it and otherwise, just thanks for being here, and a big thanks to the team behind the scenes.
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Dr. David Rock: For for being here. And if you are interested, I forgot to say, if you are interested in lead for your organization, just put the word lead and your company name, and some someone will follow up that is going into quite a few organizations now, particularly if you're a dispersed company, like people everywhere. It's really phenomenal. So put lead, and you can't me name in the chat. Someone will will follow up with you about that. So thanks very much everyone for being here. We'll leave the the chat open for my team to manage for a couple of minutes. You have any other questions? Otherwise. Yeah, just thanks so much. Emma. And the team. Take care, bye. Bye.
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Dr. David Rock: aye.