Consistent individual differences in human social learning strategies

Molleman, Lucas; Berg, Pieter van den; Weissing, Franz J.

doi:10.1038/ncomms4570

Cited by 98 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 57 publications

(63 reference statements)

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“…The results of part 1 fully confirm the earlier observation that there are marked individual differences in both the amount of social information that individuals request, and the type of information they are interested in (35). A large majority of information requests (86.7%) were of two types: individuals either requested the decisions of the four fellow group members in the previous round (henceforth referred to as frequency-information), or they requested both the decision and the payoff of two fellow group members (success-information).…”

Section: Significancesupporting

confidence: 83%

“…Before making a decision, subjects were given the opportunity to view up to four "pieces of information" about their fellow group members at a small cost, where one piece of information consisted of either a previous payoff or a previous decision of a fellow group member. The four interaction contexts we offered are consistent with those considered in our earlier study (35), but here we focus on the three social contexts.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some focus on information about the success of others (paying attention to both their decisions and the associated payoffs), whereas others are only interested in the frequencies with which behaviors occur in their social group (disregarding information about the payoffs others obtained). Moreover, individuals tend to use the same social learning strategy across different (social and nonsocial) contexts (35). However, it is unclear how the focus on different types of social information might affect the outcome of social interactions.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Focus on the success of others leads to selfish behavior

Berg

Molleman

Weissing

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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It has often been argued that the spectacular cognitive capacities of humans are the result of selection for the ability to gather, process, and use information about other people. Recent studies show that humans strongly and consistently differ in what type of social information they are interested in. Although some individuals mainly attend to what the majority is doing (frequency-based learning), others focus on the success that their peers achieve with their behavior (success-based learning). Here, we show that such differences in social learning have important consequences for the outcome of social interactions. We report on a decision-making experiment in which individuals were first classified as frequencyand success-based learners and subsequently grouped according to their learning strategy. When confronted with a social dilemma situation, groups of frequency-based learners cooperated considerably more than groups of success-based learners. A detailed analysis of the decision-making process reveals that these differences in cooperation are a direct result of the differences in information use. Our results show that individual differences in social learning strategies are crucial for understanding social behavior.social learning | cooperation | individual differences | cultural evolution | personality A cquiring information about others is a prominent feature of the human behavioral repertoire (1-3). Observing the behavior of others can allow individuals to improve their own knowledge and skills, but it can also be instrumental in anticipating how others will behave in future social interactions. Clues that help to predict how others will behave can allow for better coordination, or for being able to outsmart others for personal gain (4, 5). Indeed, the ability to keep a mental tab about the past actions of others has been put forward as one of the main mechanisms that allowed for the evolution of cooperation in humans (6, 7).This focus on social information comes with a spectacular capacity to imitate. Imitation and other forms of social learning govern the spread of information between individuals and are therefore at the basis of cultural change. Indeed, it has been argued that these mechanisms of transmission underlie a process of cultural evolution, which is in many ways analogous to genetic evolution (8-10). Social learning has allowed humans to rapidly adapt to all kinds of environmental circumstances and is ultimately responsible for the wide variety of languages, habits, forms of organization, and social norms that are found across cultures (11)(12)(13)(14). Because of this, social learning and its grouplevel consequences have been the object of considerable scientific scrutiny. Laboratory studies and theoretical models have gone hand-in-hand in respectively identifying the social learning strategies that people use (15-18) and determining how these different strategies are shaped by selection (19-21) and affect the outcome of cultural evolution (22-26). The framework of cultural evolution has b...

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Section: Significancesupporting

confidence: 83%

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Focus on the success of others leads to selfish behavior

Berg

Molleman

Weissing

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…But it does not require conformityor prestige-biased transmission at all. While conformity is surely important in humans and other primates, we also know that humans are flexible with their investment in cooperation depending upon the context [81,88,89] and that there is strong within-culture variation in the social learning strategies that individuals employ [90]. The institutional-path hypothesis better fits with these findings, by not requiring within-group homogeneity of behaviour or preferences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies

Powers

Schaik

Lehmann

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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One contribution of 18 to a theme issue 'The evolution of cooperation based on direct fitness benefits'. What drove the transition from small-scale human societies centred on kinship and personal exchange, to large-scale societies comprising cooperation and division of labour among untold numbers of unrelated individuals? We propose that the unique human capacity to negotiate institutional rules that coordinate social actions was a key driver of this transition. By creating institutions, humans have been able to move from the default 'Hobbesian' rules of the 'game of life', determined by physical/environmental constraints, into self-created rules of social organization where cooperation can be individually advantageous even in large groups of unrelated individuals. Examples include rules of food sharing in hunter-gatherers, rules for the usage of irrigation systems in agriculturalists, property rights and systems for sharing reputation between mediaeval traders. Successful institutions create rules of interaction that are self-enforcing, providing direct benefits both to individuals that follow them, and to individuals that sanction rule breakers. Forming institutions requires shared intentionality, language and other cognitive abilities largely absent in other primates. We explain how cooperative breeding likely selected for these abilities early in the Homo lineage. This allowed anatomically modern humans to create institutions that transformed the selfreliance of our primate ancestors into the division of labour of large-scale human social organization.

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“…In each of these, participants could employ trial-and-error asocial learning, or use some form of social learning. A notable recent study by Molleman et al (2014) found that participants were more likely to employ payoff bias in a two-option task where one option always has a higher payoff, but more likely to use conformity in social dilemma, coordination and evasion games where payoffs depend on other participants' behaviour.…”

Section: Social Learning Is Payoff-biased and Conformistmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies

2015

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The last two decades have seen an explosion in research analysing cultural change as a Darwinian evolutionary process. Here I provide an overview of the theory of cultural evolution, including its intellectual history, major theoretical tenets and methods, key findings, and prominent criticisms and controversies. 'Culture' is defined as socially transmitted information. Cultural evolution is the theory that this socially transmitted information evolves in the manner laid out by Darwin in The Origin of Species, i.e. it comprises a system of variation, differential fitness and inheritance. Cultural evolution is not, however, neo-Darwinian, in that many of the details of genetic evolution may not apply, such as particulate inheritance and random mutation. Following a brief history of this idea, I review theoretical and empirical studies of cultural microevolution, which entails both selection-like processes wherein some cultural variants are more likely to be acquired and transmitted than others, plus transformative processes that alter cultural information during transmission. I also review how phylogenetic methods have been used to reconstruct cultural macroevolution, including the evolution of languages, technology and social organisation. Finally, I discuss recent controversies and debates, including the extent to which culture is proximate or ultimate, the relative role of selective and transformative processes in cultural evolution, the basis of cumulative cultural evolution, the evolution of large-scale human cooperation, and whether social learning is learned or innate. I conclude by highlighting the value of using evolutionary methods to study culture for both the social and biological sciences.

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Consistent individual differences in human social learning strategies

Cited by 98 publications

References 57 publications

Focus on the success of others leads to selfish behavior

Focus on the success of others leads to selfish behavior

How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies

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