Related papers: The evolution of high-fidelity social learning
A wide variety of cultural practices take the form of "tacit" knowledge, where the rules and principles are neither obvious to an observer nor known explicitly by the practitioners. This poses a problem for cultural evolution: if beginners…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
Social learning, a cornerstone of cultural evolution, enables individuals to acquire knowledge by observing and imitating others. At the heart of its efficacy lies episodic memory, which encodes specific behavioral sequences to facilitate…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
How do people acquire rich, flexible knowledge about their environment from others despite limited cognitive capacity? Humans are often thought to rely on computationally costly mentalizing, such as inferring others' beliefs. In contrast,…
Levels of sociality in nature vary widely. Some species are solitary; others live in family groups; some form complex multi-family societies. Increased levels of social interaction can allow for the spread of useful innovations and…
Humans' distinctive role in the world can largely be attributed to our capacity for iterated learning, a process by which knowledge is expanded and refined over generations. A range of theories seek to explain why humans are so adept at…
Resources are often limited, therefore it is essential how convincingly competitors present their claims for them. Beside a player's natural capacity, here overconfidence and bluffing may also play a decisive role and influence how to share…
Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in repeated social interactions. According to this literature, individuals naturally learn to adopt conditionally cooperative strategies if they have multiple encounters…
We introduce a mathematical model that combines the concepts of complex contagion with payoff-biased imitation, to describe how social behaviors spread through a population. Traditional models of social learning by imitation are based on…
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
The tendency of repeating past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement learning experiments. It can be explained by at least two computational processes:…
This paper considers the evolution of a network in a discrete time, stochastic setting in which agents learn about each other through repeated interactions and maintain/break links on the basis of what they learn from these interactions.…
Social networks readily transmit information, albeit with less than perfect fidelity. We present a large-scale measurement of this imperfect information copying mechanism by examining the dissemination and evolution of thousands of memes,…
People make strategic decisions many times a day - during negotiations, when coordinating actions with others, or when choosing partners for cooperation. The resulting dynamics can be studied with learning theory and evolutionary game…
Adaptation to dynamic conditions requires a certain degree of diversity. If all agents take the best current action, learning that the underlying state has changed and behavior should adapt will be slower. Diversity is harder to maintain…
We consider the effects of social learning on the individual learning and genetic evolution of a colony of artificial agents capable of genetic, individual and social modes of adaptation. We confirm that there is strong selection pressure…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Imitation is an important learning heuristic in animal and human societies. Previous explorations report that the fate of individuals with cooperative strategies is sensitive to the protocol of imitation, leading to a conundrum about how…