The evolution of decision rules in complex environments

Fawcett, Tim W.; Fallenstein, Benja; Higginson, Andrew D.; Houston, Alasdair I.; Mallpress, Dave E.W.; Trimmer, Pete C.; McNamara, John M.

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2013.12.012

Cited by 211 publications

(204 citation statements)

References 88 publications

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“…The fact that individuals consistently use the same social learning strategy in different social contexts suggests that learning rules have not been tailored to perform optimally in every single context. This is in line with the view that evolution does not produce perfect behavior for every circumstance, but rather leads to the emergence of general-purpose strategies, or heuristics, that perform relatively well across the whole range of circumstances that an organism may face (49,50). It is conceivable that frequency-based learning is superior under some circumstances, whereas success-based learning is superior under other circumstances.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

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: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

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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“…If rational choice requires path independence, females should respond to the novel song without regard to previous song experience [1]. However, the effect of contrasts in this study supports the hypothesis that females assign a relative value rather than an absolute value to male traits when choosing a mate [4].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 51%

“…These contrast effects appear irrational under the view that decisions should be path independent, such that the value of past stimuli is irrelevant to current decision-making [1]. However, contrast effects appear to be taxonomically widespread and occur for a variety of stimuli [2,3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, contrast effects appear to be taxonomically widespread and occur for a variety of stimuli [2,3]. Determining how contrasts influence behaviours directly relevant to the natural history of organisms may elucidate the ecological rationality of contrast effects [1,4]. Mate choice often involves comparison of multiple mates and a resultant choice, based at least in part on perceptions of mate attractiveness [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Contrast influences female attraction to performance-based sexual signals in a songbird

2014

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Animals do not make decisions in a bubble but often refer to previous experience when discriminating between options. Contrast effects occur when the value of a stimulus affects the response to another value of the stimulus, and the changes in value and response are in the same direction. Although contrast effects appear irrational, they could benefit decision makers when there is spatial or temporal variation and autocorrelation in the value of stimuli that elicit decisions. Here, we examined whether contrasts influence female evaluation of male performance-based sexual signals. We exposed female Lincoln's sparrows (Melospiza lincolnii) to one week of songs that we had experimentally reduced or elevated in performance, followed by a novel song of intermediate performance. We found that high-performance songs were more attractive to females than low-performance songs. Moreover, the intermediate songs were more attractive following exposure to low-than to high-performance songs. These results indicate that contrast can influence evaluation of performancebased sexual stimuli. By examining contrast effects in the ecologically relevant context of mate choice for performance, we can better understand both the adaptive value of comparative evaluation as well as the mechanisms that underlie variation in mate choice and sexual selection.

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“…Blanchard et al 2014). Following this functional logic, a tendency to assume or look for patterns or regularities in a given sequence of events may be a reasonable default foraging strategy as the fitness costs of misperceiving illusory streaks were smaller during the course of evolution than the costs of making wrong predictions in environments were streaks naturally occur (Fawcett et al 2014;Navarette et al 2015;Wilke and Todd 2012). However, for habitual gamblers, it seems to be the case that this criterion is problematically liberal.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Betting on Illusory Patterns: Probability Matching in Habitual Gamblers

et al. 2015

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Why do people gamble? A large body of research suggests that cognitive distortions play an important role in pathological gambling. Many of these distortions are specific cases of a more general misperception of randomness, specifically of an illusory perception of patterns in random sequences. In this article, we provide further evidence for the assumption that gamblers are particularly prone to perceiving illusory patterns. In particular, we compared habitual gamblers to a matched sample of community members with regard to how much they exhibit the choice anomaly 'probability matching'. Probability matching describes the tendency to match response proportions to outcome probabilities when predicting binary outcomes. It leads to a lower expected accuracy than the maximizing strategy of predicting the most likely event on each trial. Previous research has shown that an illusory perception of patterns in random sequences fuels probability matching. So does impulsivity, which is also reported to be higher in gamblers. We therefore hypothesized that gamblers will exhibit more probability matching than nongamblers, which was confirmed in a controlled laboratory experiment. Additionally, gamblers scored much lower than community members on the cognitive reflection task, which indicates higher impulsivity. This difference could account for the difference in probability matching between the samples. These results suggest that gamblers are more willing to bet impulsively on perceived illusory patterns.

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The evolution of decision rules in complex environments

Cited by 211 publications

References 88 publications

Focus on the success of others leads to selfish behavior

Focus on the success of others leads to selfish behavior

Contrast influences female attraction to performance-based sexual signals in a songbird

Betting on Illusory Patterns: Probability Matching in Habitual Gamblers

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