Social learning plays an important role not only in mammals’ learning of arbitrary responses in the laboratory, but also in their acquisition of behaviors critical to survival and reproduction in natural habitats. Development of adaptive patterns of food selection, mate choice, and predator avoidance are all facilitated by interaction with successful conspecifics. Consequences of such social learning are profound, allowing mammals to flourish in portions of the environment otherwise closed to them by, for example, learning socially to select valuable foods that would otherwise be ignored or to overcome the defense of potential prey that would otherwise prove impossible to exploit.