No abstract

We observed that patients treated in clinical trials differed from patients who were not. We concluded that this may lead to differential treatment and survival. Caution is warranted when real-world outcomes are compared with trial results.

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...

Cabazitaxel and abiraterone have both received approval for treating metastatic castrate‐resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) patients after first‐line docetaxel therapy. In the cabazitaxel and abiraterone sequential treatment (CAST) study, the clinical outcome of docetaxel‐treated mCRPC patients treated sequentially with both cabazitaxel and abiraterone was studied. Data were collected retrospectively from mCRPC patients at 12 hospitals across the Netherlands who initiated cabazitaxel and/or abiraterone before December 2012. Primary outcome measure was overall survival (OS); secondary measures were progression‐free survival (PFS), biochemical PFS, and best clinical and PSA response. Hospital admission data during treatment were collected, as well as toxicities resulting in treatment discontinuation or patient death. Sixty‐three and 69 patients received Cab→Abi (cabazitaxel prior to abiraterone) and Abi→Cab before July 10th, 2013, respectively. Median OS was 19.1 months and 17.0 months in Cab→Abi and Abi→Cab treated patients, respectively (p = 0.369). Median PFS and biochemical PFS were significantly longer in Cab→Abi treated patients: 8.1 versus 6.5 (p = 0.050) and 9.5 versus 7.7 months (p = 0.024), respectively. Although partial responses to cabazitaxel occurred in both groups, Abi→Cab treated patients had a significantly decreased antitumor response from cabazitaxel than Cab→Abi treated patients (median PFS 5.0 versus 2.6 months, p < 0.001). Minor differences in toxicities were observed based on therapy sequence; generally, toxicity from cabazitaxel could be severe, while abiraterone toxicity was milder. This retrospective analysis indicates that primary progression on cabazitaxel or abiraterone did not preclude a response to the other agent in mCRPC patients. However, tumor response of both agents, particularly cabazitaxel, was lower when administered as higher‐line therapy in the selected study population.

The migration of people between different cultures has affected cultural change throughout history. To understand this process, cross-cultural psychologists have used the ‘acculturation’ framework, classifying ‘acculturation orientations’ along two dimensions: the willingness to interact with culturally different individuals, and the inclination to retain the own cultural identity (‘cultural conservatism’). Here, using a cultural evolution approach, we construct a dynamically explicit model of acculturation. We show that the evolution of a multicultural society, where immigrant and resident culture stably coexist, is more likely if individuals readily engage in cross-cultural interactions, and if resident individuals are more culturally conservative than immigrants. This result holds if some cultural traits pay off better than others, and individuals use social learning to adopt more advantageous cultural traits. Our study demonstrates that formal dynamic models can help us understand how individual orientations towards immigration eventually determine the population-level distribution of cultural traits.