TY - JOUR
T1 - The emergence and adaptive use of prestige in an online social learning task
AU - Brand, C. O.
AU - Heap, S.
AU - Morgan, T. J.H.
AU - Mesoudi, A.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the many, many participants on MTurk who tried buggy versions of our Dallinger experiment before we discovered the bugs (all these participants were duly reimbursed and compensated). We thank Matti Kin-nunen and Aleksi Pekkala for programming the abstract task based in Finland. This research was supported by The Leverhulme Trust (Grant No. RPG-2016-122 awarded to AM) and by the Kone Foundation (Grant 31-233), the Academy of Finland (Grant 258385), and the Centre of Excellence in Biological Interactions.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).
PY - 2020/12/1
Y1 - 2020/12/1
N2 - Prestige-biased social learning occurs when individuals preferentially learn from others who are highly respected, admired, copied, or attended to in their group. This form of social learning is argued to reflect novel forms of social hierarchy in human societies, and, by providing an efficient short-cut to acquiring adaptive information, underpin the cumulative cultural evolution that has contributed to our species’ ecological success. Despite these potentially important consequences, little empirical work to date has tested the basic predictions of prestige-biased social learning. Here we provide evidence supporting the key predictions that prestige-biased social learning is used when it constitutes an indirect cue of success, and when success-biased social learning is unavailable. We ran an online experiment (n = 269) in which participants could copy each other in real-time to score points on a general-knowledge quiz. Our implementation of ‘prestige’ was the number of times someone had previously been copied by others. Importantly, prestige was an emergent property of participants’ behaviour during the experiment; no deception or manipulation of prestige was employed at any time. We found that, as predicted, participants used prestige-biased social learning when the prestige cue was an indirect cue of success, and when direct success information was unavailable. This highlights how people flexibly and adaptively employ social learning strategies based on the reliability of the information that such strategies provide.
AB - Prestige-biased social learning occurs when individuals preferentially learn from others who are highly respected, admired, copied, or attended to in their group. This form of social learning is argued to reflect novel forms of social hierarchy in human societies, and, by providing an efficient short-cut to acquiring adaptive information, underpin the cumulative cultural evolution that has contributed to our species’ ecological success. Despite these potentially important consequences, little empirical work to date has tested the basic predictions of prestige-biased social learning. Here we provide evidence supporting the key predictions that prestige-biased social learning is used when it constitutes an indirect cue of success, and when success-biased social learning is unavailable. We ran an online experiment (n = 269) in which participants could copy each other in real-time to score points on a general-knowledge quiz. Our implementation of ‘prestige’ was the number of times someone had previously been copied by others. Importantly, prestige was an emergent property of participants’ behaviour during the experiment; no deception or manipulation of prestige was employed at any time. We found that, as predicted, participants used prestige-biased social learning when the prestige cue was an indirect cue of success, and when direct success information was unavailable. This highlights how people flexibly and adaptively employ social learning strategies based on the reliability of the information that such strategies provide.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41598-020-68982-4
DO - 10.1038/s41598-020-68982-4
M3 - Article
C2 - 32694697
AN - SCOPUS:85088322441
SN - 2045-2322
VL - 10
JO - Scientific reports
JF - Scientific reports
IS - 1
M1 - 12095
ER -