Understanding the multiple factors governing social learning and the diffusion of innovations

•Animals use social learning across a variety of ecological significant contexts.•Evidence suggests the use of social learning depends on its adaptive utility.•Social learning also facilitates the diffusion of innovations.•Socially-learnt innovations are an important source of behavioural plasticity.•Transmission dynamics underlying this process are a fruitful area for further study.

What animals learn from social interactions with others can profoundly shape their behaviour across a range of ecologically relevant contexts. In recent years, there has been a call for better efforts to identify social learning in wild animals, followed by a surge in observational and experimental studies. Here, I review the range of contexts in which social learning has been documented in wild animals, and argue that that the use of social learning is restricted by its adaptive utility; including when there is opportunity for social interactions during sensitive developmental periods, when personal information is hard or risky to obtain, and when social information can outperform asocial learning. I conclude by highlighting the further potential for social learning to act as a mechanism by which populations can exhibit behavioural responses to changing environments, via the diffusion of innovations.