Mammals, often, need to be taught by their parents skills and behaviours. This doesn’t seem to be the case with insects which are pretty much “Programmed” to live how they are meant to. Why?
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Mammals have plenty of instinctual behaviors too. Feeding, mating, swimming, keeping warm, keeping dry, social behaviors (think how dogs know how to engage each other pretty well), and I could go on. However, mammals generally have much more complex behavioral repertoires than, say, insects as per your example. This leads to some room for more complex learned behavior. It is however quite difficult to prove that complex behaviors are learned from watching parents or are actually also instinctual when faced with certain contexts. For instance, a lab born and raised rodent, deprived of sand and maternal care all it’s life, will still burrow when exposed to sand. It didn’t need to learn, it was instinctual. I do believe mammals do have the capacity to learn from each other, but I think it’s rarer than you might think. So much of behavior is powerfully instinctual.
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