Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds

By Lucy M. Aplin, Damien Farine, J. Morand‐Ferron, A. Cockburn, Alex Thornton, Ben C. Sheldon. Nature, 2014

647 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In human societies, cultural norms arise when behaviours are transmitted through social networks via high-fidelity social learning. However, a paucity of experimental studies has meant that there is no comparable understanding of the process by which socially transmitted behaviours might spread and persist in animal populations. Here we show experimental evidence of the establishment of foraging traditions in a wild bird population. We introduced alternative novel foraging techniques into replicated wild sub-populations of great tits (Parus major) and used automated tracking to map the diffusion, establishment and long-term persistence of the seeded innovations. Furthermore, we used social network analysis to examine the social factors that influenced diffusion dynamics. From only two trained birds in each sub-population, the information spread rapidly through social network ties, to reach an average of 75% of individuals, with a total of 414 knowledgeable individuals performing 57,909 solutions over all replicates. The sub-populations were heavily biased towards using the technique that was originally introduced, resulting in established local traditions that were stable over two generations, despite a high population turnover. Finally, we demonstrate a strong effect of social conformity, with individuals disproportionately adopting the most frequent local variant when first acquiring an innovation, and continuing to favour social information over personal information. Cultural conformity is thought to be a key factor in the evolution of complex culture in humans. In providing the first experimental demonstration of conformity in a wild non-primate, and of cultural norms in foraging techniques in any wild animal, our results suggest a much broader taxonomic occurrence of such an apparently complex cultural behaviour.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Developmental Biology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57d305227f3bc49e80f0fcd61e8861c6b521d252

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Citations in the corpus

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies (2015, background): “Conformity has been demonstrated in stickleback (Pike and Laland 2010) and great tits (Aplin et al. 2014), with an individual fish or bird disproportionately more likely to feed at a location where a majority of other individuals had fed.”
Environment modulates population social structure: Experimental evidence from replicated social networks of wild lizards (2016, background): “Low social network density is commonly reported in animal populations (Farine et al., 2015; Madden, Drewe, Pearce,& Clutton-Brock, 2009), particularly in those that are spatially structured and where spatial structure, such as partial home range overlap, constrains most individual interactions to…”
Predicting the trend of indicators related to Covid-19 using the combined MLP-MC model (2021, neutral): “Then the predicted value for the next step is obtained based on the following equations [34] : where and . . . where m = 1 .”
A framework for studying social complexity (2019, background): “…their period of activity or vice versa (Kappeler 2012), social organization changes seasonally (breeding pairs vs. winter flocks in some songbirds, Aplin et al. 2015), or were males and females are segregated into different types of social organization for most of the year (Ruckstuhl and Neuhaus…”
Constructing, conducting and interpreting animal social network analysis (2015, methodology): “…Aplin et al. 2013); (iii) studies of social processes and the implications of network structure for dynamics of information (e.g. Boogert et al. 2008; Aplin et al. 2012, 2015; Allen et al. 2013) and disease or parasite spread across networks (e.g. Godfrey et al. 2009; Hamede et al. 2009;…”
The ecology of human fear: survival optimization and the nervous system (2015, background): “This increased ability is predicted by increased activity in the fronto-parietal network and the sgACC (Schweizer et al., 2011, 2013).”