scholarly journals Strategic Social Learning and the Population Dynamics of Human Behavior: The Game of Go

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bret A Beheim ◽  
Calvin Thigpen ◽  
Richard McElreath
Keyword(s):  
Population Dynamics ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Social Learning Processes

Human culture is widely believed to undergo evolution, via mechanisms rooted in the nature of human cognition. A number of theories predict the kinds of human learning strategies, as well as the population dynamics that result from their action. There is little work, however, that quantitatively examines the evidence for these strategies and resulting cultural evolution within human populations. One of the obstacles is the lack of individual-level data with which to link transmission events to larger cultural dynamics. Here, we address this problem with a rich quantitative database from the East Asian board game known as Go. We draw from a large archive of Go games spanning the last six decades of professional play, and find evidence that the evolutionary dynamics of particular cultural variants are driven by a mix of individual and social learning processes. Particular players vary dramatically in their sensitivity to population knowledge, which also varies by age and nationality. The dynamic patterns of opening Go moves are consistent with an ancient, ongoing arms race within the game itself.

scholarly journals Pay-off-biased social learning underlies the diffusion of novel extractive foraging traditions in a wild primate

2017 ◽  
Vol 284 (1856) ◽  
pp. 20170358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan J. Barrett ◽  
Richard L. McElreath ◽  
Susan E. Perry
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Individual Learning ◽  
Adaptive Behaviour ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Important Variation ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Innovation And Diffusion

The type and variety of learning strategies used by individuals to acquire behaviours in the wild are poorly understood, despite the presence of behavioural traditions in diverse taxa. Social learning strategies such as conformity can be broadly adaptive, but may also retard the spread of adaptive innovations. Strategies like pay-off-biased learning, by contrast, are effective at diffusing new behaviour but may perform poorly when adaptive behaviour is common. We present a field experiment in a wild primate, Cebus capucinus , that introduced a novel food item and documented the innovation and diffusion of successful extraction techniques. We develop a multilevel, Bayesian statistical analysis that allows us to quantify individual-level evidence for different social and individual learning strategies. We find that pay-off-biased and age-biased social learning are primarily responsible for the diffusion of new techniques. We find no evidence of conformity; instead rare techniques receive slightly increased attention. We also find substantial and important variation in individual learning strategies that is patterned by age, with younger individuals being more influenced by both social information and their own individual experience. The aggregate cultural dynamics in turn depend upon the variation in learning strategies and the age structure of the wild population.

scholarly journals PAYOFF-BIASED SOCIAL LEARNING UNDERLIES THE DIFFUSION OF NOVEL EXTRACTIVE FORAGING TRADITIONS IN A WILD PRIMATE

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan J Barrett ◽  
Richard L McElreath ◽  
Susan E Perry
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Individual Learning ◽  
Adaptive Behaviour ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Important Variation ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Innovation And Diffusion

AbstractThe type and variety of learning strategies used by individuals to acquire behaviours in the wild are poorly understood, despite the presence of behavioural traditions in diverse taxa. Social learning strategies such as conformity can be broadly adaptive, but may also retard the spread of adaptive innovations. Strategies like payoff-biased learning, in contrast, are effective at diffusing new behaviour but may perform poorly when adaptive behaviour is common. We present a field experiment in a wild primate,Cebus capucinus, that introduced a novel food item and documented the innovation and diffusion of successful extraction techniques. We develop a multilevel, Bayesian statistical analysis that allows us to quantify individual-level evidence for different social and individual learning strategies. We find that payoff-biased social learning and age-biased social learning are primarily responsible for the diffusion of new techniques. We find no evidence of conformity; instead rare techniques receive slightly increased attention. We also find substantial and important variation in individual learning strategies that is patterned by age, with younger individuals being more influenced by both social information and their own individual experience. The aggregate cultural dynamics in turn depend upon the variation in learning strategies and the age structure of the wild population.

scholarly journals Migration, acculturation, and the maintenance of between-group cultural variation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Learning Processes

AbstractHow do migration and acculturation (i.e. psychological or behavioral change resulting from migration) affect within- and between-group cultural variation? Here I answer this question by drawing analogies between genetic and cultural evolution. Population genetic models show that migration rapidly breaks down between-group genetic structure. In cultural evolution, however, migrants or their descendants can acculturate to local behaviors via social learning processes such as conformity, potentially preventing migration from eliminating between-group cultural variation. An analysis of the empirical literature on migration suggests that acculturation is common, with second and subsequent migrant generations shifting, sometimes substantially, towards the cultural values of the adopted society. Yet there is little understanding of the individual-level dynamics that underlie these population-level shifts. To explore this formally, I present models quantifying the effect of migration and acculturation on between-group cultural variation, for both neutral and costly cooperative traits. In the models, between-group cultural variation, measured using F statistics, is eliminated by migration and maintained by conformist acculturation. The extent of acculturation is determined by the strength of conformist bias and the number of demonstrators from whom individuals learn. Acculturation is countered by assortation, the tendency for individuals to preferentially interact with culturally-similar others. Unlike neutral traits, cooperative traits can additionally be maintained by payoff-biased social learning, but only in the presence of strong sanctioning institutions. Overall, the models show that surprisingly little conformist acculturation is required to maintain realistic amounts of between-group cultural diversity. While these models provide insight into the potential dynamics of acculturation and migration in cultural evolution, they also highlight the need for more empirical research into the individual-level learning biases that underlie migrant acculturation.

scholarly journals Greater wealth inequality, less polygyny: rethinking the polygyny threshold model

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (144) ◽  
pp. 20180035 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cody T. Ross ◽  
Monique Borgerhoff Mulder ◽  
Seung-Yun Oh ◽  
Samuel Bowles ◽  
Bret Beheim ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Choice Model ◽  
Threshold Model ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Mutual Mate Choice ◽  
Polygynous Marriage ◽  
Human Mating

Monogamy appears to have become the predominant human mating system with the emergence of highly unequal agricultural populations that replaced relatively egalitarian horticultural populations, challenging the conventional idea—based on the polygyny threshold model—that polygyny should be positively associated with wealth inequality. To address this polygyny paradox, we generalize the standard polygyny threshold model to a mutual mate choice model predicting the fraction of women married polygynously. We then demonstrate two conditions that are jointly sufficient to make monogamy the predominant marriage form, even in highly unequal societies. We assess if these conditions are satisfied using individual-level data from 29 human populations. Our analysis shows that with the shift to stratified agricultural economies: (i) the population frequency of relatively poor individuals increased, increasing wealth inequality, but decreasing the frequency of individuals with sufficient wealth to secure polygynous marriage, and (ii) diminishing marginal fitness returns to additional wives prevent extremely wealthy men from obtaining as many wives as their relative wealth would otherwise predict. These conditions jointly lead to a high population-level frequency of monogamy.

Cultural evolution in more than two dimensions: Distinguishing social learning biases and identifying payoff structures

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-92
Author(s):  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Learning Biases ◽  
Payoff Structure ◽  
Social Learning Biases

AbstractBentley et al.’s two-dimensional conceptual map is complementary to cultural evolution research that has sought to explain population-level cultural dynamics in terms of individual-level behavioral processes. Here, I qualify their scheme by arguing that different social learning biases should be treated distinctly, and that the transparency of decisions is sometimes conflated with the actual underlying payoff structure of those decisions.

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 Generative inference for cultural evolution

2018 ◽  
Vol 373 (1743) ◽  
pp. 20170056 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Kandler ◽  
Adam Powell
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Interdisciplinary Studies ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Frequency Distributions

One of the major challenges in cultural evolution is to understand why and how various forms of social learning are used in human populations, both now and in the past. To date, much of the theoretical work on social learning has been done in isolation of data, and consequently many insights focus on revealing the learning processes or the distributions of cultural variants that are expected to have evolved in human populations. In population genetics, recent methodological advances have allowed a greater understanding of the explicit demographic and/or selection mechanisms that underlie observed allele frequency distributions across the globe, and their change through time. In particular, generative frameworks—often using coalescent-based simulation coupled with approximate Bayesian computation (ABC)—have provided robust inferences on the human past, with no reliance on a priori assumptions of equilibrium. Here, we demonstrate the applicability and utility of generative inference approaches to the field of cultural evolution. The framework advocated here uses observed population-level frequency data directly to establish the likely presence or absence of particular hypothesized learning strategies. In this context, we discuss the problem of equifinality and argue that, in the light of sparse cultural data and the multiplicity of possible social learning processes, the exclusion of those processes inconsistent with the observed data might be the most instructive outcome. Finally, we summarize the findings of generative inference approaches applied to a number of case studies. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution’.

scholarly journals How to Create Shared Symbols

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Fay ◽  
Bradley Walker ◽  
Nik Swoboda ◽  
Simon Garrod
Keyword(s):  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Cognitive Bias ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
Referential Communication ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Communication Effectiveness ◽  
Concurrent Partner ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Communication Experiment ◽  
The Creation

Human cognition and behaviour is dominated by symbol use. This paper examines the social learning strategies that give rise to symbolic communication. Experiment 1 contrasts an individual-level account, based on observational learning and cognitive bias, with an inter-individual account, based on social coordinative learning. Participants played a referential communication game in which they tried to communicate a range of recurring meanings to a partner by drawing, but without using their conventional language. Individual-level learning, via observation and cognitive bias, was sufficient to produce communication systems that became increasingly effective, efficient and shared over games. However, breaking a referential precedent eliminated these benefits. The most effective, most efficient and most shared signs arose when participants could directly interact with their partner, indicating that social coordinative learning is important to the creation of shared symbols. Experiment 2 investigated the contribution of two distinct aspects of social interaction: behaviour alignment and concurrent partner feedback. Each played a complementary role in the creation of shared symbols: behaviour alignment primarily drove communication effectiveness, and partner feedback primarily drove the efficiency of the evolved signs. In conclusion, inter-individual social coordinative learning is important to the evolution of effective, efficient and shared symbols.

scholarly journals Visits at artificial RFID flowers demonstrate that juvenile flower-visiting bats perform foraging flights apart from their mothers

2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (5) ◽  
pp. 463-471
Author(s):  
Andreas Rose ◽  
Marco Tschapka ◽  
Mirjam Knörnschild
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Foraging Behavior ◽  
Dry Forest ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Maternal Provisioning ◽  
Flower Visiting ◽  
Reading System ◽  
Social Learning Processes ◽  
Artificial Flowers

Abstract During the transition from parental care to independent life, the development of adequate foraging skills is a major challenge for many juvenile mammals. However, participating in their parents’ knowledge by applying social learning strategies might facilitate this task. For several mammals, communal foraging of adults and offspring is suggested to be an important mechanism in mediating foraging-related information. For the large mammalian taxon of bats, only little is known about foraging-related social learning processes during ontogeny. It is often suggested that following their mothers during foraging flights would represent a valuable option for juveniles to socially learn about foraging, e.g., where to find resource-rich foraging patches, but explicit tests are scarce. In the present study, we investigated the foraging behavior of juvenile flower-visiting bats (Glossophaga soricina) in a dry forest in Costa Rica. We tested whether recently volant, but still nursed pups perform foraging flights alone, or whether pups follow their mothers, which would enable pups to socially learn where to feed. For that, we trained mothers and pups to feed from artificial flowers with a RFID reading system and, subsequently, conducted a field experiment to test whether RFID-tagged mothers and pups visit these flowers communally or independently. Unexpectedly, pups often encountered and visited artificial flowers near the day roost, while mothers rarely did, suggesting that they foraged somewhere further away. Our results demonstrate that still nursed juveniles perform foraging flights apart from their mothers and might learn about the spatial distribution of food without participating in their mother’s knowledge, for instance, by following other conspecifics or applying individual learning strategies. An initial potential lack of foraging success in this period is likely compensated by the ongoing maternal provisioning with breast milk and regurgitated nectar during daytime. Our results contribute to the growing body of research on the ontogeny of mammalian foraging behavior in general.

scholarly journals The study of culture and evolution across disciplines

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Individual Learning ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Proximate Causation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Or Gene ◽  
Social Learning Processes

A source of continued tension within the evolutionary human behavioural / social sciences, as well as between these fields and the traditional social sciences, is how to conceptualise ‘culture’ in its various manifestations and guises. One of the earliest criticisms of E O Wilson’s sociobiology project was the focus on presumed genetically evolved behavioural universals, and lack of attention to cultural diversity and cultural (as opposed to genetic) history. As sociobiology split into different fields during the 1980s, each developed their own approaches and assumptions. Human behavioural ecologists employed the ‘phenotypic gambit’, assuming that culture is a proximate means by which natural selection generates currently-adaptive behavioural strategies. Evolutionary psychologists distinguished between transmitted and evoked culture, the former involving the social transmission of information, the latter involving the triggering of genetically-prespecified behaviours in response to different environmental cues (typically ancestral cues, such that behaviour may no longer be currently adaptive). Evoked culture has been the focus of most research in evolutionary psychology. Cognitive anthropologists have a similar notion of ‘cultural attraction’, where universal aspects of cognition evoke predictable responses due to individual learning. Finally, cultural evolution (or gene-culture coevolution) approaches stress the causal role of transmitted culture. Here, human cognition is assumed to be relatively domain-general and content-free, with genetic evolution having shaped social learning processes to allow the rapid spread of locally adaptive knowledge (although occasionally allowing the spread of maladaptive behaviour, due to the partial decoupling of genetic and cultural evolution). All the while, the traditional social sciences have remained steadfastly unwilling to accept that evolutionary approaches to human behaviour have any merit or relevance, and indeed have abandoned the scientific method in favour of more politically motivated interpretive methods. Most curiously, the social sciences have abandoned the concept of culture, as they define it. I will discuss all of these approaches in terms of (i) the extent to which they give causal weight to genetic inheritance, individual learning and social learning, and how these process interact; (ii) their assumptions about the domain-specificity of human cognition; (iii) ultimate-proximate causation; (iv) specific debates over language evolution, cooperation and the demographic transition; and (v) prospects for reconciliation and integration of these tensions across the evolutionary human sciences and the social sciences more broadly.

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