Prestige-biased social learning: current evidence and outstanding questions

Jiménez, Ángel V.; Mesoudi, Alex

doi:10.1057/s41599-019-0228-7

Cited by 131 publications

(129 citation statements)

References 95 publications

(113 reference statements)

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“…Accent has not previously been used in social transmission experiments, and prestige has often been established through attentional cues or deference (Atkisson, Mesoudi and O'Brien, 2012;Chudek et al, 2012;Henrich and Gil-White, 2001;Jiménez and Mesoudi, 2019b). However, in any transmission event that relies upon the use of speech or verbal cues, accent prestige may be an additional confound that is unaccounted for.…”

Section: Accents As a Robust Proxy For Prestigementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here, we demonstrate how accent is a potential source of information bias in social learning, and this work is motivated by the need for a widely shared experimental mechanism of establishing prestige information. Although prestige can be indexed in many ways; experiments have tended to focus on attentional cues or deference as measures of prestige (Atkisson, Mesoudi, & O'Brien, 2012;Brand & Mesoudi, 2019;Chudek, Heller, Birch, & Henrich, 2012;Henrich & Gil-White, 2001;Jiménez & Mesoudi, 2019b). This is problematic because greater attention and deference are not just cues of prestige but a direct outcome.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evaluations of accents can be used as a measure of prestige

Samarasinghe¹,

Berl

Gavin

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Sociolinguistic studies have established that people make judgements about speakers based on accent. Standard and non-standard accents have differing levels of prestige and demonstrate variation across other attitudinal terms. Because prestige can increase the likelihood of information transmission, we explore variation in accent prestige to determine whether accent can be used as a measure of prestige in social transmission experiments. Participants (n=152 US; 142 UK) were presented with standardised recordings of a standard passage, containing lexical terms that highlight phonological differences between accents of English. Passages were spoken by middle-aged white male speakers representing a range of eight accents from the listener’s country of residence and two from the alternative country. Participants rated the speakers on 24 different personal qualities including traits associated with prestige and friendliness. As predicted, participants rated the standard accents favourably for prestige across both locations. Participants perceived location-specific non-standard accents as having lower prestige, and accents deemed as having lower prestige as being friendlier. Accent indexes differential qualities for listeners, regardless of whether the concept is operationalised by the term “prestigious” or multiple terms related to ‘prestige’. We assert that accent can be used as an indicator of prestige in the absence of other prestige information and demonstrate the importance of locally calibrating the accents used in prestige-based social transmission experiments.

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Section: Accents As a Robust Proxy For Prestigementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluations of accents can be used as a measure of prestige

Samarasinghe¹,

Berl

Gavin

et al. 2019

Preprint

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“…Outgroup avoidance of this group's adopted protective behavior can arise if there are status differentials across the groups. Prestige bias is a mechanism that can drive differential uptake of novel behavior by different groups (Boyd and Richerson, 1985), for which there is quite broad support (Jiménez and Mesoudi, 2019). When both groups are highly homophilous and outgroup aversion is strong, the resulting dynamics suggest the case of negative partisanship (Abramowitz and Webster, 2016), in which differences in the relative size of the epidemic will be driven purely by differences in the adoption rates by the two groups, including those differences induced by outgroup aversion.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coupled Dynamics of Behavior and Disease Contagion Among Antagonistic Groups

Smaldino

Jones

2020

Preprint

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Disease transmission and behavior change are both fundamentally social phenomena. Behavior change can have profound consequences for disease transmission, and epidemic conditions can favor the more rapid adoption of behavioral innovations. We analyze a simple model 3 of coupled behavior-change and infection in a structured population characterized by homophily and outgroup aversion. Outgroup aversion slows the rate of adoption and leads to bifurcation when outgroup aversion exceeds positive ingroup influence. When the rates of adoption differ by 6 group, high outgroup aversion causes the later-adopting group to have a lower equilibrium adoption fraction, even when the behavior is highly desirable. When disease dynamics are coupled to the behavior-adoption model, a wide variety of dynamics are possible. Homophily can either 9 increase or decrease the final size of the epidemic depending on its relative strength in the two groups and R 0 for the infection. When R 0 ≈ 1 and homophily is strong in the second group, it can be protective for this group. However, when R 0 1, we find that strong homophily in 12 the second group, together with outgroup aversion, can lead to a much larger epidemic in that group. Similarly, if the first group is homophilic and the second is not, the second group will have a larger epidemic. Homophily and outgroup aversion can also produce a "second wave" in 15 the first group that follows the peak of the epidemic in the second group. In general, adding outgroup aversion to a population characterized by homophily can result in paradoxical failure to adopt behavior that is protective from infection. These simple models reveal complex dynamics 18 that are suggestive of the processes currently observed under pandemic conditions in culturally and/or politically polarized populations such as the United States. 21for cumulative culture, and particularly to the rapid and flexible adaptability that arisesHébert-Dufresne et al., 2020; Mehta and Rosenberg, 2020). These models typically assume that individuals differ only in behavior and disease status. Thus, the spread of both disease and behavior depend primarily on rates of behavior transmission and dis-51 ease recovery. This is true even of models in which the population is structured on networks. Network structure can change the dynamics of contagion. However, contrary to the assumptions of most models, behavioral distributions on social networks are any-54 thing but random. People assort in highly non-random ways (McPherson et al., 2001) and these non-random associations both drive and are driven by social identity. This suggests that the role of social identity is an important, but under-studied, component 57 of coupled contagion models. Identity exerts a powerful force on the dynamics of behavior (Hogg and Abrams,

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“…To this end, people use social rank cues or signals that convey information about the level of prestige and dominance of other individuals. We classify social rank cues into firstorder and second-order cues (Jiménez & Mesoudi 2019a). First-order cues are cues related to the behaviour, appearance, personality, material possessions, etc.…”

Section: Social Rank Cuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cultural Transmission of Prestige and Dominance Social Rank Cues: an Experimental Simulation

Jiménez

Mesoudi

2020

Evolutionary Psychological Science

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Informal social hierarchies within small human groups are argued to be based on prestige, dominance, or a combination of the two (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). Prestige-based hierarchies entail the ordering of individuals by the admiration and respect they receive from others due to their competence within valued domains. This type of hierarchy provides benefits for subordinates such as social learning opportunities and both private and public goods. In contrast, dominance-based hierarchies entail the ordering of individuals by their capacity to win fights, and coerce or intimidate others. This type of hierarchy produces costs in subordinates due to its aggressive and intimidating nature. Given the benefits and costs associated with these types of social hierarchies for subordinates, we hypothesised that prestige and dominance cues are better recalled and transmitted than social rank cues that do not elicit high prestige or dominance associations (i.e. medium social rank cues). Assuming that for the majority of the population who are not already at the top of the social hierarchy it is more important to avoid the costs of dominance-based hierarchies than to obtain the benefits of prestige-based hierarchies, we further hypothesised that dominance cues are better transmitted than prestige cues. We conducted a recall-based transmission chain experiment with 30 chains of four generations each (N = 120). Participants read and recalled descriptions of prestigious, dominant, and medium social rank footballers, and their recall was passed to the next participant within their chain. As predicted, we found that both prestige cues and dominance cues were better transmitted than medium social rank cues. However, we did not find support for our prediction of the better transmission of dominance cues than prestige cues. We discuss whether the results might be explained by a specific social-rank content transmission bias or by a more general emotional content transmission bias.

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Prestige-biased social learning: current evidence and outstanding questions

Cited by 131 publications

References 95 publications

Evaluations of accents can be used as a measure of prestige

Evaluations of accents can be used as a measure of prestige

Coupled Dynamics of Behavior and Disease Contagion Among Antagonistic Groups

The Cultural Transmission of Prestige and Dominance Social Rank Cues: an Experimental Simulation

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