Social information use and social information waste

Abstract

Social information is immensely valuable. Yet we waste it. The information we get from observing other humans and from communicating with them is a cheap and reliable informational resource. It is considered the backbone of human cultural evolution. Theories and models focused on the evolution of social learning show the great adaptive benefits of evolving cognitive tools to process it. In spite of this, human adults in the experimental literature use social information quite inefficiently: they do not take it sufficiently into account. A comprehensive review of the literature on five experimental tasks documented 45 studies showing social information waste, and four studies showing social information being over-used. These studies cover ‘egocentric discounting’ phenomena as studied by social psychology, but also include experimental social learning studies. Social information waste means that human adults fail to give social information its optimal weight. Both proximal explanations and accounts derived from evolutionary theory leave crucial aspects of the phenomenon unaccounted for: egocentric discounting is a pervasive effect that no single unifying explanation fully captures. Cultural evolutionary theory's insistence on the power and benefits of social influence is to be balanced against this phenomenon. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution’.

Beyond social learning

“…The capacity to learn socially has been observed in supposedly solitary species such as the common octopus [47] and the red-footed tortoise [48]. If, as some researchers suspect [12], conspecifics interact infrequently in these species, it is unlikely that they have culture, because the stability of cultural traditions requires that individuals interact frequently. Individuals should be tolerant and sufficiently gregarious, both cognitive-behavioural tendencies that, in turn, have population-level effects [49].…”

“…A second limitation of the focus on social learning is that researchers commonly treat it simply as an expressed behaviour, blackboxing underlying mechanisms [9,11,12]. Blackboxing is, of course, a necessary first step when explaining any behaviour.…”

Partisan biases in social information use

“…Overall, participants adjusted 29% towards social information. This indicates that on average, participants assigned more than twice as much weight to their own first predictions than to social information, reflecting the widely documented phenomenon of 'egocentric discounting' [26,27].…”

Foundations of cultural evolution

“…Morin et al [12] review experimental studies on the extent to which people use social information in updating their beliefs and behaviours, a process lying at the heart of cultural transmission. Their synthesis of results from a wide range of different research traditions reveals a consistent pattern of people heeding social information less than theoretically predicted.…”