An experimental comparison of human social learning strategies: payoff-biased social learning is adaptive but underused

By Alex Mesoudi. 2011

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Analytical models have identified a set of social learning strategies that are predicted to be adaptive relative to individual (asocial) learning. In the present study, human participants engaged in an ecologically valid artifact-design task with the opportunity to engage in a range of social learning strategies: payoff bias, conformity, averaging and random copying. The artifact (an arrowhead) was composed of multiple continuous and discrete attributes which jointly generated a complex multimodal adaptive landscape that likely reflects actual cultural fitness environments. Participants exhibited a mix of individual learning and payoff-biased social learning, with negligible frequencies of the other social learning strategies. This preference for payoff-biased social learning was evident from the initial trials, suggesting that participants came into the study with an intrinsic preference for this strategy. There was also a small but significant increase in the frequency of payoff-biased social learning over sessions, suggesting that strategy choice may itself be subject to learning. Frequency of payoff-biased social learning predicted both absolute and relative success in the task, especially in a multimodal (rather than unimodal) fitness environment. This effect was driven by a minority of hardcore social learners who copied the best group member on more than half of trials. These hardcore social learners were also above-average individual learners, suggesting a link between individual and social learning ability. The lower-than-expected frequency of social learning may reflect the existence of information producer–scrounger dynamics in human populations.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/695ea0e2713c781fab3ee2484118d9b42f25e88b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cultural Studies

1. Marius Kempe
2. H. Lu
3. Lei Chang
4. Alex Mesoudi
5. Keelin Murray
6. Christine A. Caldwell
7. Ailsa E. Millen

In Social Psychology

1. Marius Kempe
2. Alex Mesoudi
3. Lei Chang
4. Keelin Murray
5. H. Lu
6. Christine A. Caldwell
7. Ailsa E. Millen

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Marius Kempe
2. Lei Chang
3. H. Lu
4. Alex Mesoudi
5. Keelin Murray
6. Christine A. Caldwell
7. Ailsa E. Millen

Citations in the corpus

• An experimental demonstration of the effect of group size on cultural accumulation (2014, background): “While the assumption of success-biased cultural transmission is a reasonable one (see, for example, McElreath, Bell, Efferson, Lubell, Richerson, & Waring, 2008; Mesoudi, 2008, 2011b), learning from just a single individual may be less plausible.”
• Higher frequency of social learning in China than in the West shows cultural variation in the dynamics of cultural evolution (2015, background): “03) shown in Table S5 is slightly lower than the frequency of copying in UK participants from a previous study [1] that used the same task and a”
• Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies (2015, methodology): “McElreath et al. (2008) found this using a simple twooption task of planting wheat or potatoes where one gave higher yields, Morgan et al. (2011) using various tasks including mental rotation and perceptual judgements, and Mesoudi (2011b) using a more complex artifact-design task.”