Beyond existence and aiming outside the laboratory: estimating frequency-dependent and pay-off-biased social learning strategies

Abstract

The existence of social learning has been confirmed in diverse taxa, from apes to guppies. In order to advance our understanding of the consequences of social transmission and evolution of behaviour, however, we require statistical tools that can distinguish among diverse social learning strategies. In this paper, we advance two main ideas. First, social learning is diverse, in the sense that individuals can take advantage of different kinds of information and combine them in different ways. Examining learning strategies for different information conditions illuminates the more detailed design of social learning. We construct and analyse an evolutionary model of diverse social learning heuristics, in order to generate predictions and illustrate the impact of design differences on an organism's fitness. Second, in order to eventually escape the laboratory and apply social learning models to natural behaviour, we require statistical methods that do not depend upon tight experimental control. Therefore, we examine strategic social learning in an experimental setting in which the social information itself is endogenous to the experimental group, as it is in natural settings. We develop statistical models for distinguishing among different strategic uses of social information. The experimental data strongly suggest that most participants employ a hierarchical strategy that uses both average observed pay-offs of options as well as frequency information, the same model predicted by our evolutionary analysis to dominate a wide range of conditions.

Consistent individual differences in human social learning strategies

“…The results of such investigations are corroborated by evidence from controlled laboratory studies, which indicate that people attend to the frequencies of their peers' behaviour, as well as to the payoffs associated with it [23][24][25][26][27][28][29] . In addition, there are indications that the extent to which people resort to social information depends on factors like task difficulty, confidence in their own information 30 and environmental variability 31 .…”

The evolution of cultural adaptations: Fijian food taboos protect against dangerous marine toxins

“…2, (McElreath et al 2008). Recent experimental work with children has underscored these adult findings, by showing how children use subtle cues of competence, reliability, performance, prestige and intent (Jaswal & Neely 2006;Birch et al 2008;VanderBorght & Jaswal 2009) to figure out whom they will attend to and learn from.…”

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies

“…Subsequent experiments have shown that people employ both of these social learning strategies, as predicted, but that payoff bias is typically preferred to conformity. McElreath et al (2008) found this using a simple two-option 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 artifactdesign task. In each of these, participants could employ trial-and-error asocial learning, or use some form of social learning.…”