Negative observational learning might play a limited role in the cultural evolution of technology

Abstract

Theoretical and empirical studies of the cultural evolution in technology have often focused on positive observational learning, i.e., copying a successful individual. However, negative observational learning, i.e., avoiding negative or bad exemplar behavior, is ubiquitous in humans and other animals. In this paper, we experimentally investigate whether observing negative examples can assist in tool making in the virtual arrowhead task, which has been widely applied to test the theory of cultural evolution in the technological domain. We set three conditions that differ in the kinds of social learning available to participants: (1) positive observational learning, (2) negative observational learning, and (3) pure asocial learning. The results of the positive observational and pure asocial learning conditions replicated previous studies; i.e., participants in the positive observational learning condition outperformed those in the asocial learning condition. In contrast, opportunities to observe negative examples did not increase the performance compared to pure asocial learning. Computer simulations in the same setting showed that the presence of negative exemplars is in theory beneficial to participants, providing additional pieces of information on the relationship between arrowhead designs and their performance scores. These findings together suggest that negative observational learning might play only a limited role in the cultural evolution of technologies possibly due to a cognitive bias in humans toward copying.

Research on the influencing factors of the citizen adoption process of China's national integrated online government service platform

“…(2010) proposed that human observational learning can be explained by observational action and observational outcome prediction errors, with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex corresponding to two distinct observational learning signals, respectively. Nakawake and Kobayashi (2022) proved through comparative experiments that individuals who were provided with positive information performed better than ordinary individuals in observational learning, while those who were provided with negative information did not differ significantly from ordinary individuals in the process of observational learning. Through experiments and questionnaire surveys, Yoon et al.…”

Exploring new technologies for the future generation: exploration–exploitation trade-off in an intergenerational framework

“…When an agent explored a new arrowhead design in a trial, it chose one attribute at random and modified its value by L=5 units in the memorized direction (+ or true0−). We chose the value of L=5 because it was the median value of the level of modification observed in laboratory experiments by Mesoudi & O’Brien [30] and Nakawake & Kobayashi [28]. When an agent chose exploitation (i.e.…”

“…Once it was clicked, an image of flintknapping appeared. If the length or width was changed, the picture of the arrowhead displayed in the main panel also changed in proportion to the chosen values (we did not visualize the thickness of the arrowhead following previous studies; [30,28]). The initial value for each attribute was fixed and common for all participants except the second-generation players in the repaid and unrepaid conditions, for whom the initial value was the final value of the first-generation counterpart.…”

“…The finding by previous studies that intergenerational cooperation generally needs institutions or emotional treatments [19,20,22] implies, on the other hand, that humans do have the potential to cooperate with the future generation, and various non-utilitarian factors inherent in real innovative practises, such as entertainment or sense of goal accomplishment, which are usually ignored in economic experiments, could elicit it. As an ideal experimental framework with these realistic features, we adopt the virtual arrowhead task [26,27], which has been successfully used to investigate multiple topics concerning cultural evolution [1,8,[28][29][30]. For this task, participants design an arrowhead, whose performance depends on multiple attributes (e.g.…”

On Mainstreaming Philosophy of Science in Psychology Through “Psychological Theoretics

“…Analyzing data in an unconventional way would require discussing the rationale and referencing sources (articles, books, book chapters, and conference proceedings) that recommend the proposed analysis. Given our human tendency to copy good examples (Nakawake & Kobayashi, 2022), psychologists are more likely to copy methods being published without questioning their status in the science. This implies that non-adherence to methodological reforms to address the reproducibility and replicability crisis lies in the fact that psychologists rarely read and/or cite methodology papers while they are more likely to use the methods with currency in the field.…”