scholarly journals Social learning strategies regulate the wisdom and madness of interactive crowds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wataru Toyokawa ◽  
Andrew Whalen ◽  
Kevin N. Laland
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Group Size ◽  
Collective Intelligence ◽  
Collective Wisdom ◽  
The Social ◽  
Challenging Tasks ◽  
Task Uncertainty ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Learning Strategies

AbstractWhy groups of individuals sometimes exhibit collective ‘wisdom’ and other times maladaptive ‘herding’ is an enduring conundrum. Here we show that this apparent conflict is regulated by the social learning strategies deployed. We examined the patterns of human social learning through an interactive online experiment with 699 participants, varying both task uncertainty and group size, then used hierarchical Bayesian model-ftting to identify the individual learning strategies exhibited by participants. Challenging tasks elicit greater conformity amongst individuals, with rates of copying increasing with group size, leading to high probabilities of herding amongst large groups confronted with uncertainty. Conversely, the reduced social learning of small groups, and the greater probability that social information would be accurate for less-challenging tasks, generated ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effects in other circumstances. Our model-based approach provides evidence that the likelihood of collective intelligence versus herding can be predicted, resolving a longstanding puzzle in the literature.

scholarly journals When to approach novel prey cues? Social learning strategies in frog-eating bats

2013 ◽  
Vol 280 (1772) ◽  
pp. 20132330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia L. Jones ◽  
Michael J. Ryan ◽  
Victoria Flores ◽  
Rachel A. Page
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Mobile Phone ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Social Transmission ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
The Social ◽  
Trachops Cirrhosus ◽  
Different Sources ◽  
Social Learning Strategies

Animals can use different sources of information when making decisions. Foraging animals often have access to both self-acquired and socially acquired information about prey. The fringe-lipped bat, Trachops cirrhosus , hunts frogs by approaching the calls that frogs produce to attract mates. We examined how the reliability of self-acquired prey cues affects social learning of novel prey cues. We trained bats to associate an artificial acoustic cue (mobile phone ringtone) with food rewards. Bats were assigned to treatments in which the trained cue was either an unreliable indicator of reward (rewarded 50% of the presentations) or a reliable indicator (rewarded 100% of the presentations), and they were exposed to a conspecific tutor foraging on a reliable (rewarded 100%) novel cue or to the novel cue with no tutor. Bats whose trained cue was unreliable and who had a tutor were significantly more likely to preferentially approach the novel cue when compared with bats whose trained cue was reliable, and to bats that had no tutor. Reliability of self-acquired prey cues therefore affects social learning of novel prey cues by frog-eating bats. Examining when animals use social information to learn about novel prey is key to understanding the social transmission of foraging innovations.

scholarly journals Individual Differences in Intelligence and Personality Guide Human Social Learning

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Fay ◽  
Gilles E Gignac ◽  
Bradley Walker
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Openness To Experience ◽  
Alternative Solution ◽  
General Intelligence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Egocentric Bias ◽  
Cultural Evolutionary ◽  
Social Learning Strategies

Little is known about the extent to which individual differences guide social learning. Here we use individual differences in intelligence and personality, specifically openness to experience, to predict the social learning strategies people use. Participants (N = 220) completed a range of general intelligence tests, a personality questionnaire, and a battery of novel behavioral tasks. In each behavioral task participants were trained on the solution to a problem. They were then informed of an alternative solution to the same problem that varied in terms of its quality, simulating new social information. The extent to which participants switched to a superior solution measured content-biased social learning, and the extent to which they retained the trained solution, when presented with an alternative solution of equal or higher quality, measured egocentric bias. As predicted by cultural evolutionary theory, most participants exhibited content-biased social learning. However, a significant minority (20-40%) exhibited an egocentric bias, preferring to retain the familiar, but often suboptimal, trained solution. Higher general intelligence was associated with general solution switching but was more strongly related to switching to a superior solution. So, higher general intelligence predicted content-biased social learning. By contrast, higher openness to experience, and therefore lower egocentric bias, was uniquely associated with switching to an inferior solution. So, egocentric bias (or lower openness to experience) was adaptive as it inhibited participants from switching to a maladaptive solution. Our findings highlight the importance of individual differences in intelligence and personality to human social learning.

Wary learners

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-48
Author(s):  
Alberto Acerbi
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Cognitive Operations ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Learning Strategies

Cultural evolution is a diverse field of research, but some similarities can be found: cultural evolutionists defend a quantitative, naturalistic, and interdisciplinary approach to the study of human culture. Importantly, cultural evolutionists are committed to develop sound hypotheses about the individual psychology that drives our cultural behavior. Although there are different nuances, a common idea is that human cognition is specialized for processing social interactions, communication, and learning from others. From an evolutionary point of view, the cognitive mechanisms involved should produce, on average, adaptive outcomes. From this perspective, social learning strategies (a series of relatively simple, general-domain, heuristics to choose when, what, and from whom to copy) provide a first boundary to indiscriminate social influence. I critically examine the concept of social learning strategies, and I discuss how cultural evolutionists may have overestimated both the effect of social influence and, possibly, our reliance of social learning itself. I also discuss the perspective from epistemic vigilance theory, which gives more weight to the possibility of explicit deception, and proposes that we apply sophisticated cognitive operations when deciding whether to trust information coming from others.

scholarly journals Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament

Science ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 328 (5975) ◽  
pp. 208-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Rendell ◽  
R. Boyd ◽  
D. Cownden ◽  
M. Enquist ◽  
K. Eriksson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Learning Strategies

scholarly journals Social learning in otters

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (8) ◽  
pp. 170489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zosia Ladds ◽  
William Hoppitt ◽  
Neeltje J. Boogert
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Social Transmission ◽  
Food Sources ◽  
Primate Species ◽  
Diffusion Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Association Data ◽  
Social Learning Strategies

The use of information provided by others to tackle life's challenges is widespread, but should not be employed indiscriminately if it is to be adaptive. Evidence is accumulating that animals are indeed selective and adopt ‘social learning strategies’. However, studies have generally focused on fish, bird and primate species. Here we extend research on social learning strategies to a taxonomic group that has been neglected until now: otters (subfamily Lutrinae). We collected social association data on captive groups of two gregarious species: smooth-coated otters ( Lutrogale perspicillata ), known to hunt fish cooperatively in the wild, and Asian short-clawed otters ( Aonyx cinereus ), which feed individually on prey requiring extractive foraging behaviours. We then presented otter groups with a series of novel foraging tasks, and inferred social transmission of task solutions with network-based diffusion analysis. We show that smooth-coated otters can socially learn how to exploit novel food sources and may adopt a ‘copy when young’ strategy. We found no evidence for social learning in the Asian short-clawed otters. Otters are thus a promising model system for comparative research into social learning strategies, while conservation reintroduction programmes may benefit from facilitating the social transmission of survival skills in these vulnerable species.

scholarly journals Blackboxing: social learning strategies and cultural evolution

2016 ◽  
Vol 371 (1693) ◽  
pp. 20150369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Heyes
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Digital Natives ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Social Learning Strategies ◽  
Better Than

Social learning strategies (SLSs) enable humans, non-human animals, and artificial agents to make adaptive decisions about when they should copy other agents, and who they should copy. Behavioural ecologists and economists have discovered an impressive range of SLSs, and explored their likely impact on behavioural efficiency and reproductive fitness while using the ‘phenotypic gambit’; ignoring, or remaining deliberately agnostic about, the nature and origins of the cognitive processes that implement SLSs. Here I argue that this ‘blackboxing' of SLSs is no longer a viable scientific strategy. It has contributed, through the ‘social learning strategies tournament', to the premature conclusion that social learning is generally better than asocial learning, and to a deep puzzle about the relationship between SLSs and cultural evolution. The puzzle can be solved by recognizing that whereas most SLSs are ‘planetary'—they depend on domain-general cognitive processes—some SLSs, found only in humans, are ‘cook-like'—they depend on explicit, metacognitive rules, such as copy digital natives . These metacognitive SLSs contribute to cultural evolution by fostering the development of processes that enhance the exclusivity, specificity, and accuracy of social learning.

scholarly journals How copying affects the amount, evenness and persistence of cultural knowledge: insights from the social learning strategies tournament

2011 ◽  
Vol 366 (1567) ◽  
pp. 1118-1128 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Rendell ◽  
R. Boyd ◽  
M. Enquist ◽  
M. W. Feldman ◽  
L. Fogarty ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Adaptive Plasticity ◽  
Effective Strategies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Computer Based ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Social Learning Strategies

Darwinian processes should favour those individuals that deploy the most effective strategies for acquiring information about their environment. We organized a computer-based tournament to investigate which learning strategies would perform well in a changing environment. The most successful strategies relied almost exclusively on social learning (here, learning a behaviour performed by another individual) rather than asocial learning, even when environments were changing rapidly; moreover, successful strategies focused learning effort on periods of environmental change. Here, we use data from tournament simulations to examine how these strategies might affect cultural evolution, as reflected in the amount of culture (i.e. number of cultural traits) in the population, the distribution of cultural traits across individuals, and their persistence through time. We found that high levels of social learning are associated with a larger amount of more persistent knowledge, but a smaller amount of less persistent expressed behaviour, as well as more uneven distributions of behaviour, as individuals concentrated on exploiting a smaller subset of behaviour patterns. Increased rates of environmental change generated increases in the amount and evenness of behaviour. These observations suggest that copying confers on cultural populations an adaptive plasticity, allowing them to respond to changing environments rapidly by drawing on a wider knowledge base.

Social Learning

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Hoppitt ◽  
Kevin N. Laland
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Distribution ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Experimental Psychology ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Mathematical Methods ◽  
Indispensable Tool ◽  
Social Learning Strategies

Many animals, including humans, acquire valuable skills and knowledge by copying others. Scientists refer to this as social learning. It is one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of behavioral research and sits at the interface of many academic disciplines, including biology, experimental psychology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience. This book provides a comprehensive, practical guide to the research methods of this important emerging field. It defines the mechanisms thought to underlie social learning and demonstrate how to distinguish them experimentally in the laboratory. It presents techniques for detecting and quantifying social learning in nature, including statistical modeling of the spatial distribution of behavior traits. It also describes the latest theory and empirical findings on social learning strategies, and introduces readers to mathematical methods and models used in the study of cultural evolution. This book is an indispensable tool for researchers and an essential primer for students.

Strong conformity requires a greater proportion of asocial learning and achieves lower fitness than a payoff-based equivalent

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
pp. 323-333
Author(s):  
Matt Grove
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Theoretical Analysis ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Learning Strategy ◽  
Individual Learning ◽  
Heterogeneous Environments ◽  
The One ◽  
Social Learning Strategies

There is a growing interest in the relative benefits of the different social learning strategies used to transmit information between conspecifics and in the extent to which they require input from asocial learning. Two strategies in particular, conformist and payoff-based social learning, have been subject to considerable theoretical analysis, yet previous models have tended to examine their efficacy in relation to specific parameters or circumstances. This study employs individual-based simulations to derive the optimal proportion of individual learning that coexists with conformist and payoff-based strategies in populations experiencing wide-ranging variation in levels of environmental change, reproductive turnover, learning error and individual learning costs. Results demonstrate that conformity coexists with a greater proportion of asocial learning under all parameter combinations, and that payoff-based social learning is more adaptive in 97.43% of such combinations. These results are discussed in relation to the conjecture that the most successful social learning strategy will be the one that can persist with the lowest frequency of asocial learning, and the possibility that punishment of non-conformists may be required for conformity to confer adaptive benefits over payoff-based strategies in temporally heterogeneous environments.

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