Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament

By H. Roche, M. Kibunjia, F. H. Brown, I. Mcdougall, I. Davies, R. Maier, E. Delson, K. Nishiizumi, M. Caffee, R. Finkel and 4 more. 2010

741 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It Pays to Be a Copy Cat Does it pay to copy what others do? Rendell et al. (p. 208) elected to copy Robert Axelrod's 1979 tournament in which strategies for playing the iterated prisoner's dilemma game were pitted against each other until an overall winner emerged—the tit-for-tat strategy. In the 2008 tournament, 100 social learning strategies designed to cope with a changing environment competed against each other; the winning strategy involved sampling the behaviors of other players periodically, rather than exploring the environment alone. Learning from what others do is more efficient than learning all on one’s own. Social learning (learning through observation or interaction with other individuals) is widespread in nature and is central to the remarkable success of humanity, yet it remains unclear why copying is profitable and how to copy most effectively. To address these questions, we organized a computer tournament in which entrants submitted strategies specifying how to use social learning and its asocial alternative (for example, trial-and-error learning) to acquire adaptive behavior in a complex environment. Most current theory predicts the emergence of mixed strategies that rely on some combination of the two types of learning. In the tournament, however, strategies that relied heavily on social learning were found to be remarkably successful, even when asocial information was no more costly than social information. Social learning proved advantageous because individuals frequently demonstrated the highest-payoff behavior in their repertoire, inadvertently filtering information for copiers. The winning strategy (discountmachine) relied nearly exclusively on social learning and weighted information according to the time since acquisition.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

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Citations in the corpus

How algorithmic popularity bias hinders or promotes quality (2017, background): “hat the cost of learning about quality will lead to \stars" with disproportionate popularity irrespective of dierences in quality [1]. Such trade2 os are common in social learning environments [28]. Salganik et al. created a music-sharing platform to determine under which conditions one can pre”
An experimental comparison of human social learning strategies: payoff-biased social learning is adaptive but underused (2011, background): “001 in the recent “social learning strategies tournament” (Rendell et al., 2010), in which scholars and members of the public submitted learning strategies that competed against one another in an unknown and relatively complex environment.”
A Bayesian approach to the evolution of social learning (2012, background): “Individuals use Bayesian inference to combine social and nonsocial cues about the current state of the environment.”
What motivates entrepreneurial entry under economic inequality? The role of human and financial capital (2015, positive): “This secondhand experience has been mentioned in the literature (Davidsson, 1991; Davidsson and Honig, 2003) as a potential driver of entrepreneurial entry since those exposed to it tend to learn and replicate such endeavors (Autio and Pathak, 2010; Rendell et al., 2010).”
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