Strategic social learning and the population dynamics of human behavior: the game of Go

Abstract

Human culture is widely believed to undergo evolution, via mechanisms rooted in the nature of human cognition. A number of theories predict the kinds of human learning strategies, as well as the population dynamics that result from their action. There is little work, however, that quantitatively examines the evidence for these strategies and resulting cultural evolution within human populations. One of the obstacles is the lack of individual-level data with which to link transmission events to larger cultural dynamics. Here, we address this problem with a rich quantitative database from the East Asian board game known as Go. We draw from a large archive of Go games spanning the last six decades of professional play, and find evidence that the evolutionary dynamics of particular cultural variants are driven by a mix of individual and social learning processes. Particular players vary dramatically in their sensitivity to population knowledge, which also varies by age and nationality. The dynamic patterns of opening Go moves are consistent with an ancient, ongoing arms race within the game itself.

Cultural evolution of football tactics: strategic social learning in managers’ choice of formation

“…Contrary to the more specific prediction (Hypothesis H2) that managers should rely more on social than personal information, given the difficulty of personally trialling different formations in the high stakes world of football management and previous findings of greater social information use by Beheim et al (2014), there was if anything more reliance on personal information. This is puzzling not only for the aforementioned reasons (the difficulty of individual learning should favour reliance on social learning, plus the previous findings of Beheim et al), but also the fact that the population provides much more information overall in the same time period.…”

“…When combined appropriately, individual and social learning can generate cumulative cultural evolution at the population level, where innovations generated via individual learning are preserved and accumulated over generations via social learning (Mesoudi & Thornton, 2018). Beheim, Thigpen & McElreath (2014) provided an innovative demonstration of the strategic use of social and individual learning in the real world. They analysed decades of professional matches of the board game Go to understand the spread of an opening move, the 'Fourfour'.…”

“…Here I use a 5-year dataset of all games (n = 9127, 2012-2017) in the five top European leagues (English Premier League, German Bundesliga, Spanish La Liga, French Ligue 1 and Italian Serie A) to test the following hypotheses, derived from the above theory and the results of Beheim et al (2014). All hypotheses and analyses were preregistered before running any analyses on the original data (https://osf.io/er4dx), and all data and code are available at https://github.com/amesoudi/football.…”

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies

“…Henrich and Henrich (2010) showed that pregnant women in Fijian fishing villages preferentially acquire adaptive food taboos from locally prestigious unrelated older women, consistent with prestige bias. Beheim et al (2014) analysed records of opening moves of professional players of the popular East Asian board game Go, showing the preferential copying of the moves of successful players. These findings fit with data from sociology on the diffusion of innovations (E. Rogers 1995) showing that innovations often spread via successful or high status 'change agents', and sociolinguistics (Labov 1972) showing that dialect change spreads via the imitation of successful or prestigious individuals.…”

Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution

“…There is also evidence of cross-cultural variation in social learning, specifically higher social learning in collectivistic East Asian societies than in individualistic Western societies (90,91). Similar individual and cultural variation in nonexperimental data suggests that this finding is not just a laboratory artifact (92).…”