Some people appear to learn more slowly. Could they just be learning different things? Suppose two groups of children are learning words – they have growing vocabularies – but one group acquires the list more slowly than the other. Can we use the structure of the information they learn to gain insight into whether or not they are learning different information? Small worlds are one way of measuring the structure of a community. When quantitatively defined, small worlds have a number of useful properties, including that they compare the structure of a network relative to different versions of itself, thereby providing a kind of ‘control’ network against which to benchmark a measurement. In this chapter, I discuss small worlds and several ways to evaluate them, and then use them to answer a simple question: Are children who learn to talk late just slow versions of early talkers? Or are they learning something different about the world? Along the way, I will enumerate three different approaches to explaining where structure comes from: function, formation, and emulation.

Given the apparent importance of exempla to Cicero’s project in De Officiis, any account of Cicero’s philosophical method in this work is forced to grapple with the question of how these historical insets function within the text. Yet understanding how, exactly, they contribute to the reader’s moral progress is an interpretative challenge: Cicero’s treatment warns us against taking them simply as models for imitation. Instead, I argue, Cicero focuses on three different, but related, functions for his exempla within De Officiis. First, looking at the behaviour of others can help us to develop the analytical skills necessary to correctly deliberate about our own actions. Secondly, exempla work to verify the theoretical claims of the text. Finally, they show the beneficial outcomes of following the teachings of the text, in terms of the glory and praise that accrues to those who engage in correct action – though, as we shall see, this strategy is only effective because of Cicero’s radical redefinition of the concepts of glory and praise.

The chapter sets out to explain what is meant by authoritarian learning. It starts by defining authoritarianism, learning and authoritarian learning before detailing the research findings that it is under-theorised, that it is less hierarchical then widely considered in the literature, that the intra-state level is as crucial to learning as the inter-state level, that regional organisations are important, and that authoritarian learning is more than the spread of ideas. Rather, learning between authoritarian-minded elites is direct, with regular dialogue to develop best survival practices to consolidate power. Authoritarian learning theoretically incorporates experiential and social learning and integrates diffusion, emulation, linkage, policy-transfer, and lesson-drawing. Having addressed the theoretical aspects of authoritarian learning, we address the external and internal networks of authoritarian learning. The chapter ends by providing a plan for the book.

This paper compares how ideas of power, rank, and status were communicated in Etruria and Anatolia in the Orientalizing period by the use of material items and images. By employing and exhibiting specific objects, elites used a non-verbal language to communicate with each other across frontiers in the Mediterranean area as well as to show their wealth and their sophistication in their own surroundings. Trade networks have been discovered, analyzed, and exhibited on various occasions in the last decade. However, we now have to deal with the significance of the selection, collection, and use of certain luxury items to the ostentation of accumulated wealth that are better known from the courtly societies of the Near and Middle East. The desire for possessing these items can be perceived in personal or private as well as social terms. As many of the items belong to the sphere of banqueting, it is mandatory to link the two worlds in question vis-à-vis this praxis of consumption and social events.

State formation in East Asia developed a thousand years before it did in Europe, and it occurred for reasons of emulation, not competition. China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea emerged as states beginning in the second century BCE, and existed for centuries thereafter with centralized bureaucratic control defined over territory and administrative capacity to tax their populations, field large militaries, and provide extensive public goods. They created these institutions not to wage war. Rather, these countries developed states through emulation of China. State formation in historical East Asia occurred under a hegemonic system in which war was relatively rare, not under a balance of power system with regular existential threats. Rather, domestic elites copied Chinese civilization for reasons of prestige and domestic legitimacy. Our research challenges the universality of the bellicentric thesis of state formation. The willingness to acknowledge the Eurocentric origins of much of IR theory is not new; what is new in this book is the empirical evidence we bring that shows this explicitly, and a positive theoretical contribution about the causes of state formation.

There was an extensive epistemic community in historical East Asia that was central to the creation and dissemination of regional civilization that flowed mainly from China outwards, from core to periphery. This epistemic community was composed of Buddhist monks and Confucian scholars. They studied at Buddhist temples and Confucian academies, wrote in a common Chinese language using common styles, and made up the bulk of government officials in each country. These scholar-officials were also the ones who staffed diplomatic missions to other countries. This chapter will discuss in detail the flows of monks and literati between the various countries, and trace the influence of this transnational scholarly and religious community on the evolution of societies – as well as state formation – throughout the region.

Describing and explaining state formation in Korea and Japan is fundamentally about understanding the transformative, enduring, and massive impact of Chinese civilization on its neighbors throughout the entire East Asian region and across literally thousands of years. The best way to understand Chinese civilization and its neighbors is as core and periphery – a massive hegemon’s influence. In the 4th century, the Korean peninsula contained three kingdoms: Silla, Paekche, and Koguryo. All three Korean states learned from and emulated China extensively and intensively. In Japan, historians call the new, centralized order built in Japan during the 4th to 8th century theritsuryo state, because it was based on Chinese-style penal (ritsu) and administrative (ryo) codes. The impact of Chinese civilization was comprehensive, including language, education, writing, poetry, art, mathematics, science, religion, philosophy, social and family structure, political and administrative institutions and ideas, and more. The strands of this civilization that had to do with government are almost impossible to understand outside of this larger civilizational context.

Social learning, a type of information transmission in which individuals gain information by observing or interacting with another animal or the products of another animal’s actions, is an extensively studied subject in a wide array of species. Of particular interest is the ability of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to learn socially, especially given their extensive sociality and fission–fusion dynamics, which provides many opportunities for individuals to learn from each other in different contexts. Using observational and experimental approaches, researchers have explored how faithfully chimpanzees copy others, the type of information conveyed between individuals, and the extent to which social learning is influenced by external factors. In this chapter we review what is currently known about the mechanisms by which chimpanzees socially learn and the strategies they may employ when doing so. We also discuss the much-debated topic of chimpanzee "culture," and how this compares to our own culture. Last, we provide a comparative perspective for social learning in chimpanzees with other species, and discuss how understanding chimpanzee social learning can be useful in their captive care and aiding their conservation in the wild.

Envy is a ubiquitous emotion which plays an important role in human life. This Introduction provides a brief overview of the taxonomy of envy and a chapter-by-chapter synopsis.

This chapter argues that Plutarch’s moralising works (especially the Progress in Virtue and Parallel Lives) show signs of having been significantly influenced by Roman exemplary ethics. Plutarch brings Roman ideas about exemplary ethics and imitation to bear on the Greek philosophical tradition, and his critique of Platonic mimesis is emboldened by the critical Roman framework which he must have encountered as a lived Roman tradition, not just in the Latin literature that he may have read as a source for his Roman lives and other writings, but also in day-to-day experiences with his Roman friends, such as Sosius Senecio, to whom he dedicates both Progress in Virtue and the Parallel Lives.