Social Learning Strategies in Networked Groups

Abstract

When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results showed that participants combined multiple sources of information to guide learning, including payoffs of peers' solutions, popularity of solution elements among peers, similarity of peers' solutions to their own, and relative payoffs from individual exploration. Furthermore, performance was positively associated with imitation rates at both the individual and group levels. When peers' payoffs were hidden, popularity and similarity biases reversed, participants searched more broadly and randomly, and both quality and equity of exploration suffered. We conclude that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation does not simply permit scrounging, but it can also facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration.

Exploration versus exploitation in space, mind, and society

“…For example, search for innovations by groups (including industries and nations) can be improved through balancing small bursts of social learning during periods of environmental change against long stretches of exploiting known strategies during periods of environmental stability [72]. In environments where solutions are hard to find but nonetheless indicated by other solutions, imitation can act as a form of group memory and enhance long-term performance by facilitating search around good solutions that have been found in the past [73]. This is not unlike the search behavior observed among schooling fish [74].…”

Social learning in humans and other animals

“…Without directly experiencing each outcome, most people can use this information to guide their decision about where to eat. This not only applies to learning food preferences, but also to mating decisions, fear learning, and problem-solving strategies (Olsson and Phelps, 2007; Gruber et al, 2009; Yorzinski and Platt, 2010; van den Bos et al, 2013; Wisdom et al, 2013). The process through which individuals learn from others rather than through direct experience is referred to as social learning.…”

Social learning and the replication process: an experimental investigation

“…However, it raises interesting questions about how individuals process social information. This behaviour can indeed be easily explained when the requirement of the task is to combine discrete units in an appropriate way [15,17,18], but is much more surprising with the type of task required in our game. Do individuals make accurate inferences about what discrete properties are contributing to arrowhead efficiency?…”

“…This suggests that all of the individuals from the social learning treatment, including the best ones, were able to use social information, including less efficient solutions, to refine their own solutions. The combination of information coming from multiple sources, which has been previously documented in various experimental studies [15][16][17][18], seems widely implicated in this process. However, it raises interesting questions about how individuals process social information.…”

“…More recently, Griffiths et al [14] demonstrated that socially learned information is affected by inductive biases, i.e. the constraints on learning and memory, while other experiments suggested that individuals are able to aggregate information from multiple sources [15][16][17][18]. More generally, it has been argued that individual and social learning should not be considered as two distinct and alternative learning processes [11,19].…”