The development of human social learning across seven societies

Edwin J. C. Leeuwen, Emma Cohen, Emma Collier-Baker, Christian J. Rapold, Marie Schäfer, Sebastian Schütte and Daniel B. M. Haun ()
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Edwin J. C. Leeuwen: University of St Andrews
Emma Cohen: University of Oxford
Emma Collier-Baker: Forest, Nature and Environment Aceh
Christian J. Rapold: University of Regensburg
Marie Schäfer: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Sebastian Schütte: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Daniel B. M. Haun: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Social information use is a pivotal characteristic of the human species. Avoiding the cost of individual exploration, social learning confers substantial fitness benefits under a wide variety of environmental conditions, especially when the process is governed by biases toward relative superiority (e.g., experts, the majority). Here, we examine the development of social information use in children aged 4–14 years (n = 605) across seven societies in a standardised social learning task. We measured two key aspects of social information use: general reliance on social information and majority preference. We show that the extent to which children rely on social information depends on children’s cultural background. The extent of children’s majority preference also varies cross-culturally, but in contrast to social information use, the ontogeny of majority preference follows a U-shaped trajectory across all societies. Our results demonstrate both cultural continuity and diversity in the realm of human social learning.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04468-2

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