High-Fidelity Social Learning

Abstract

Social learning has been shown to be more prevalent within organizations rather than across. To explain this regularity, prior research points mostly to structural conditions often found inside organizations, such as proximity or organization-specific language. We complement these explanations with an individual-based view: people display a behavioral disposition for *high-fidelity* social learning, i.e., copying with high accuracy from others, when learning from members of their own organization (and not from outside sources). We use two pre-registered field experiments to provide empirical support for this individual-level disposition. In our experiments, we document a significant increase in social learning when doing so from fellow organizational members, of which 75% can be attributed to high-fidelity social learning. This effect trumps prestige-biased social learning and, consistent with a behavioral predisposition, it seems to operate through sentiments and not reason.