 Two success-biased social learning strategiesRyan Baldini Theoretical Population Biology, 2013, vol. 86, issue C, 43-49 Abstract: I compare the evolutionary dynamics of two success-biased social learning strategies, which, by definition, use the success of others to inform one’s social learning decisions. The first, “Compare Means†, causes a learner to adopt cultural variants with highest mean payoff in her sample. The second, “Imitate the Best†, causes a learner to imitate the single most successful individual in her sample. I summarize conditions under which each strategy performs well or poorly, and investigate their evolution via a gene-culture coevolutionary model. Despite the adaptive appeal of these strategies, both encounter conditions under which they systematically perform worse than simply imitating at random. Compare Means performs worst when the optimal cultural variant is usually at high frequency, while Imitate the Best performs worst when suboptimal variants sometimes produce high payoffs. The extent to which it is optimal to use success-biased social learning depends strongly on the payoff distributions and environmental conditions that human social learners face. Keywords: Social learning strategies; Cultural evolution; Human behavior (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:86:y:2013:i:c:p:43-49 DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2013.03.005 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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