Social Learning Strategies and Cooperative Behaviour: Evidence of Payoff Bias, but Not Prestige or Conformity, in a Social Dilemma Game

Human cooperation, occurring without reciprocation and between unrelated individuals in large populations, represents an evolutionary puzzle. One potential explanation is that cooperative behaviour may be transmitted between individuals via social learning. Using an online social dilemma experiment, we find evidence that participants’ contributions were more consistent with payoff-biased transmission than prestige-biased transmission or conformity. We also found some evidence for lower cooperation (i) when exposed to social information about peer cooperation levels than without such information, and (ii) in the prisoners’ dilemma game compared to the snowdrift game. A simulation model established that the observed cooperation was more likely to be caused by participants’ general propensity to cooperate than by the effect of social learning strategies employed within the experiment, but that this cooperative propensity could be reduced through selection. Overall, our results support previous experimental evidence indicating the role of payoff-biased transmission in explaining cooperative behaviour, but we find that this effect was small and was overwhelmed by participants’ general propensity for cooperation.

The potential for effective reasoning guides children’s preference for small group discussion over crowdsourcing

Communication between social learners can make a group collectively “wiser” than any individual, but conformist tendencies can also distort collective judgment. We asked whether intuitions about when communication is likely to improve or distort collective judgment could allow social learners take advantage of the benefits of communication while minimizing the risks. In three experiments (n=360), 7- to 10-year old children and adults decided whether to refer a question to a small group for discussion or “crowdsource” independent judgments from individual advisors. For problems which could be conclusively solved through “demonstrable” analytic or physical reasoning, all ages preferred to consult the group, even compared to a crowd ten times as large — consistent with past research suggesting that groups regularly outperform even their best members for reasoning problems. In contrast, we observed a consistent developmental shift towards crowdsourcing independent judgments when reasoning by itself was insufficient to conclusively answer a question. Results suggest sophisticated intuitions about the nature of social influence and collective intelligence may guide our social learning strategies from early in development.

Chytrost bez porozumění: hypotéza kulturní inteligence a její limity

Humans are remarkably adaptable, and therefore a successful species. There are many speculative answers to the question of why this is so. One of them represents the cultural intelligence hypothesis, which consid-ers cultural learning skills as the key to human success. This work aims to present the hypothesis of cultural intelligence as a viable alternative to more conventional approaches within the debate about the origin of human intelligence, such as the hypothesis of general and improvisational intelligence. Theirmutual comparison shows that cultural intelligence hypothesis must necessarily work with flexible social learning strategies to describe cultural transmission, thus losing part of its explanatory power. As the theory of metacognitive strategies of social learning by cognitive psychologist Cecilia Heyes shows, there is a way to combine the flexibility of human reasoning with the “stupid” process of cultural selection.

Using Social Strategies in Teaching German as a Foreign Language at Primary School Level

The major purpose of this quantitative research is to investigate the frequency of social learning strategies used in teaching German as a foreign language within the population of primary school students of the higher grade (corresponding to the age of 11 to 14). Furthermore, the aim of this study is to explore the statistically significant differences between pupil’s gender, age, second language performance assessment as predictors and social learning strategies as dependent variables. The research was done during the first semester of the school year 2019 / 2020 with 218 students. The modified questionnaire Strategy Inventory for Language Learning designed by Rebecca Oxford, Likert and Guttman scale were used for data collection. The Cronbach’s Alpha reliability coefficient of the modified scale was α = .89. The research data was analysed by a quantitative method with IBM SPSS 23 and the results revealed that the primary school learners employed social learning strategies with an average value of 3.30, which represents a medium frequency of use. Results have shown that female students tend to use social learning strategies more frequently than males (Mf = 11.05; Mm = 9.74) and their usage becomes less intense with age (М5 = 4.14, М6 = 3.69, М7 = 2.42, М8 = 2.39). Performance assessment is not contributing significantly to their frequency (rho = .18, p = .39). The Mann - Whitney U test is used to compare whether there is a statistically significant difference in the dependent variable for two independent groups: students in late childhood and students in early adolescence. Results have shown that the second group of students use rarer social learning strategies than the first. Therefore, older learners were exposed to the strategies input. The Wilcoxon signed - rank test was used to compare repeated measurements on a single sample to assess whether their population mean ranks differ. Results have shown that strategies input contributing statistically significant to the detected changes in a date caused by strategies input (z = - 5.24 , p = .01). The slight difference between arithmetic means (М1 = 3.22; М2 = 3.36) was explained with the Affective filter hypothesis Stephen Krashen developed in the 1980s. This paper points out the importance of using social strategies in teaching and learning German as a foreign language. Pedagogical implications refer to some important indicators of social learning strategies – symmetrical and complementary interpersonal communication and the use of cooperative learning principles in the classroom.

Learning strategies and long-term memory in Asian short-clawed otters ( Aonyx cinereus )

Social learning, where information is acquired from others, is taxonomically widespread. There is growing evidence that animals selectively employ ‘social learning strategies', which determine e.g. when to copy others instead of learning asocially and whom to copy. Furthermore, once animals have acquired new information, e.g. regarding profitable resources, it is beneficial for them to commit it to long-term memory (LTM), especially if it allows access to profitable resources in the future. Research into social learning strategies and LTM has covered a wide range of taxa. However, otters (subfamily Lutrinae), popular in zoos due to their social nature and playfulness, remained neglected until a recent study provided evidence of social learning in captive smooth-coated otters ( Lutrogale perspicillata ), but not in Asian short-clawed otters ( Aonyx cinereus ). We investigated Asian short-clawed otters' learning strategies and LTM performance in a foraging context. We presented novel extractive foraging tasks twice to captive family groups and used network-based diffusion analysis to provide evidence of a capacity for social learning and LTM in this species. A major cause of wild Asian short-clawed otter declines is prey scarcity. Furthering our understanding of how they learn about and remember novel food sources could inform key conservation strategies.

Processing of novel food reveal payoff and rank-biased social learning in a wild primate

Cultural complexity is strongly shaped by the efficiency by which new knowledge is propagated. Different social learning strategies (SLS), where individuals biasedly learn particular behaviors or from specific demonstrators, can contribute to an individual’s success. While SLS have been mostly studied in isolation, their interaction and the interplay between individual and social learning is less understood. We performed a field-based open diffusion experiment in a wild primate. We provided two groups of vervet monkeys with a novel food, unshelled peanuts, and documented how three different peanut opening techniques spread within the groups. We analyzed data using hierarchical Bayesian dynamic learning models that explore the integration of multiple SLS with individual learning. We show that vervets preferentially use the technique yielding the highest observed payoff, and also bias attention toward individuals of higher rank. This shows that traditions may arise when individuals integrate information about the efficiency of a behavior alongside cues related to the rank of a demonstrator.

Neophobia and social facilitation in narrow-striped mongooses

Social learning is widespread in the animal kingdom, but individuals can differ in how they acquire and use social information. Personality traits, such as neophobia, may, for example, promote individual learning strategies. Here, we contribute comparative data on social learning strategies in carnivorans by examining whether narrow-striped mongooses (Mungotictis decemlineata), a group-living Malagasy euplerid, learn socially and whether neophobia influences social learning. To this end, we tested seven wild female groups with a two-option artificial feeding box, using a demonstrator–observer paradigm, and conducted novel object tests to assess neophobia. In five groups, one individual was trained as a demonstrator displaying one of the techniques, whereas the other two groups served as control groups. Neophobia did not co-vary with an individual’s propensity to seek social information. However, less neophobic individuals, and individuals that tended to seek social information, learned the task faster. Moreover, individuals in demonstrator groups learned the task faster than those in groups without a demonstrator and used the demonstrated technique more often. Hence, narrow-striped mongooses rely on social facilitation and local or stimulus enhancement to solve new problems. Finally, our results suggest that several individual characteristics should be taken into consideration to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of social learning strategies.