Consistent individual differences in human social learning strategies

Lucas Molleman, Pieter van den Berg and Franz J. Weissing ()
Additional contact information
Lucas Molleman: Theoretical Biology Group, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 11103, Groningen 9700 CC, The Netherlands
Pieter van den Berg: Theoretical Biology Group, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 11103, Groningen 9700 CC, The Netherlands
Franz J. Weissing: Theoretical Biology Group, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 11103, Groningen 9700 CC, The Netherlands

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Social learning has allowed humans to build up extensive cultural repertoires, enabling them to adapt to a wide variety of environmental and social conditions. However, it is unclear which social learning strategies people use, especially in social contexts where their payoffs depend on the behaviour of others. Here we show experimentally that individuals differ in their social learning strategies and that they tend to employ the same learning strategy irrespective of the interaction context. Payoff-based learners focus on their peers’ success, while decision-based learners disregard payoffs and exclusively focus on their peers’ past behaviour. These individual differences may be of considerable importance for cultural evolution. By means of a simple model, we demonstrate that groups harbouring individuals with different learning strategies may be faster in adopting technological innovations and can be more efficient through successful role differentiation. Our study highlights the importance of individual variation for human interactions and sheds new light on the dynamics of cultural evolution.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4570 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms4570

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4570

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().