Blackboxing: social learning strategies and cultural evolution

Heyes, Cecilia

doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0369

Cited by 104 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 47 publications

(76 reference statements)

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“…Therefore, assessing the impact of this social learning bias is crucial to accurately predicting the threats posed by poachers and the demographic costs that the removal of such individuals from the population would have (Whitehead 2010). Also important to such assessments is whether individuals are flexible in employing different social learning strategies that enable them to learn when to switch to a different demonstrator if their demonstrator becomes unreliable or ceases to exist (discussed in Heyes 2016; Mesoudi et al 2016). …”

Section: Learning Is Biasedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harnessing learning biases is essential for applying social learning in conservation

Greggor

Thornton

Clayton

2016

Behav Ecol Sociobiol

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Social learning can influence how animals respond to anthropogenic changes in the environment, determining whether animals survive novel threats and exploit novel resources or produce maladaptive behaviour and contribute to human-wildlife conflict. Predicting where social learning will occur and manipulating its use are, therefore, important in conservation, but doing so is not straightforward. Learning is an inherently biased process that has been shaped by natural selection to prioritize important information and facilitate its efficient uptake. In this regard, social learning is no different from other learning processes because it too is shaped by perceptual filters, attentional biases and learning constraints that can differ between habitats, species, individuals and contexts. The biases that constrain social learning are not understood well enough to accurately predict whether or not social learning will occur in many situations, which limits the effective use of social learning in conservation practice. Nevertheless, we argue that by tapping into the biases that guide the social transmission of information, the conservation applications of social learning could be improved. We explore the conservation areas where social learning is highly relevant and link them to biases in the cues and contexts that shape social information use. The resulting synthesis highlights many promising areas for collaboration between the fields and stresses the importance of systematic reviews of the evidence surrounding social learning practices.

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Section: Learning Is Biasedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harnessing learning biases is essential for applying social learning in conservation

Greggor

Thornton

Clayton

2016

Behav Ecol Sociobiol

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“…), it is impossible to disentangle the very learning bias that the observers follow, while this is exactly what we want to know (e.g. see Heyes, 2016). For instance, if we were to investigate the evolutionary roots of conformist decision making and we find that immigrant vervet monkeys, patas monkeys and rhesus macaques all adjust their preferences to the majority of the new group, we would need to know whether they were biased to 'the majority' or to any other cue provided by the majority, for without this knowledge, the apparent similarity in decision-making strategies across these species may be purely coincidental rather than a phylogenetic signal.…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

A reappreciation of ‘conformity’

et al. 2016

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“…Fogarty, Rendell & Laland 2012;Tomasello 1999;2014) but it is problematic (Heyes, 2016a). Unlike active social learning, mindreading and imitation are good candidates to be the secret of our success in that they appear to be distinctively human.…”

Section: What Is Cultural Learning?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The swashbuckling anthropologist: Henrich on The Secret of Our Success

Clarke

Heyes

2016

Biol Philos

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Keywords Cultural evolution. Cultural learning. Multi-level selection. Cognitive science.Homo sapiens: Just another species of animal? While we have many continuities with our primate cousins, and with the other inhabitants of the living realm more broadly, it is also true that people are pretty special. We do all manner of th for example, some of us wear clothes, vote in elections, give hi-fives, or write book reviews. It is also true that we, as a species, have been very prosperous we inhabit a huge range of different habitats, our population has exploded and we are able to dominate and control most of the creatures who attempt to share our habitats with us. In The Secret of our Success (henceforth SOOS) Joseph Henrich argues that these properties are connected that those idiosyncrasies of our behaviour that we tend to term for the success our species enjoys. We think this a most reasonable ss, slowness and dullness of senses, we have been able to out-compete so many much stronger, faster and physically less vulnerable animals. A solitary, unequipped and uneducated human is generally a fairly unimpressive specimen. But allow her access to her culture and all that it can do and she might move mountains.The devil is in the detail of this appealing thesis, however. W it, and what is the nature of its connection to our success? SOOS presents as a trade book, so it is packed with colourful examples, personal observations, anecdotes, and connections with current events; the language is racy and informal. This makes it a lively, engaging read in which the author emerges in a good way as a swashbuckling anthropologist. Navigating the high seas of field work, and thrusting the sword of laboratory intervention, Henrich is trying to bring it all together into a new, coherent picture of human origins. But, perhaps inevitably, the details and the logical structure are somewhat difficult to divine. SOOS succeeds in giving an exciting glimpse of the rapidly expanding academic literature on cultural evolution and will be sure to attract new enthusiasts to the topic. A dryer text may have served better as a contribution to the literature, however. We accordingly focus, in this review, on discussing how we would like to see the field develop, and what we wish the book had spelt out. First, we offer the following summary of the main ideas on display. SummaryHenrich claims that human beings are unique different from all other animals in that they engage in a process of Cumulative Cultural Evolution (hereafter CCE). It is the technological and cognitive products of CCE, he argues, that explain our extraordinary success. Henrich allows that some nonhuman animals may be capable of some cultural evolution, but he insists that only humans have become able to sustain cultural evolution in its cumulative form.

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Blackboxing: social learning strategies and cultural evolution

Cited by 104 publications

References 47 publications

Harnessing learning biases is essential for applying social learning in conservation

Harnessing learning biases is essential for applying social learning in conservation

A reappreciation of ‘conformity’

The swashbuckling anthropologist: Henrich on The Secret of Our Success

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