 Success-biased social learning: Cultural and evolutionary dynamicsRyan Baldini Theoretical Population Biology, 2012, vol. 82, issue 3, 222-228 Abstract: Success bias is a social learning strategy whereby learners tend to acquire the cultural variants of successful individuals. I develop a general model of success-biased social learning for discrete cultural traits with stochastic payoffs, and investigate its dynamics when only two variants are present. I find that success bias inherently favors rare variants, and consequently performs worse than unbiased imitation (i.e. random copying) when success payoffs are at least mildly stochastic and the optimal variant is common. Because of this weakness, success bias fails to replace unbiased imitation in an evolutionary model when selection is fairly weak or when the environment is relatively stable, and sometimes fails to invade at all. I briefly discuss the optimal strength of success bias, the complicated nature of defining success in social learning contexts, and the value of variant frequency as an important source of information to social learners. I conclude with predictions regarding the prevalence of success bias in different behavioral domains. Keywords: Social learning strategies; Cultural evolution; Success-biased social learning (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:82:y:2012:i:3:p:222-228 DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2012.06.005 Access Statistics for this article Theoretical Population Biology is currently edited by Jeremy Van Cleve More articles in Theoretical Population Biology from Elsevier |
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