Being a naturalistic observation Kawai couldn’t control any extraneous variables in his study, he could never be sure that social learning caused the other monkeys to imitate Imo.
Also is the fact that operant conditioning plays a role in the findings of this study for two reasons.
The first being that the monkeys only went onto the beach as they were being rewarded to do so, they had learnt the behaviour through rewarding, the key concept of operant conditioning.
Also, Imo found the sweet potatoes tasted better once washed so if other monkeys tried it once and found it tasted better and so repeated the behaviour, again they were being rewarded for a certain behaviour. Although the study does have some extraneous variables it is a good indication of the role social learning has in the behaviour in NHA’s. It shows that animals imitate each other and learn this way, they socialise and pick up knew skills. A human example of this can be found in studies of anorexia and bulimia where young girls often diet to be as skinny as those around them, to conform to magazine images. They learn socially that to be skinny is good.
It was found in Kawai’s study that the young monkeys socialised a lot more and therefore learnt more socially than the older monkeys. This was reflected in the findings of the study which indicates that NHA’s learn behaviour through imitating ie imitating and cultural transmission.
The results also show social learning plays more of a role in the behaviour of snow monkeys but we are not sure if they can be extrapolated to include other animals.
Fischer and Hinde ( 1949) collected reports of birds opening milk bottle tops. Birds would remove the foil tops to drink the cream off the top of the milk. Fischer and Hinde found the behaviour spread extremely quickly throughout Britain. This led them to believing birds were imitating each other to learn the new skill. Fischer and Hinde are not sure how the behaviour was learnt in the first place. It may have been a skill which they already for foraging yet transferred to a new situation (like opening bottle tops).
There was no actual study it was just reports of incidents which may have been exaggerated etc.
In 1984 Sherry and gaylef did a laboratory experiment. Into birds opening milk bottle containers. Being an experiment it allowed them to get a cause- effect relationship as extraneous variables were kept as a minimum but it meant that the behaviour, whilst occurring in the “real” world was forced and unnatural.. The results show that the role of social learning did effect the behaviour of NHA’s as three in the experimental condition learnt the behaviour from the tutor bird but only one in the control condition did. The situation though was forced and those in the experimental condition may have had the flash of inspiration which the four original birds did and ultimately the control bird did. This shows that the learning may be individual, based on trial and error rather than social. Also, though the birds used are related to tits the results may differ when actual tits were experimented on.
Overall social learning plays quite a large part in behaviour of NHA’s though it is hard to measure to what extent.