ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2011
Exploring the costs and benefits of social information use: an appraisal of current experimental evidence.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 74 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
74 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review and meta-analysis of unimodal and multimodal predation risk assessment in birds.Nature communications · 2024Pooled it
- The neural underpinnings of an optimal exploitation of social information under uncertainty.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2014Trial
- Trade-offs across life history stages and social association types shape winter communal roosting in a long-lived raptor.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Experimental manipulation of ecological and cognitive conditions produces the entire conformity-diversity spectrum in a single species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Contextual use of male-male social information by Trinidadian guppies.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Behavioural public policy should take the psychology of poverty into account.Communications psychology · 2025Review
- Deciding When to Align: Computational and Neural Mechanisms of Goal-Directed Social Alignment.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Individual Antipredator Responses Are Positively Correlated Across Cue Types in Free-Living Black-Capped Chickadees (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Social learning preserves both useful and useless theories by canalizing learners' exploration.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Consistent long-distance foraging flights across years and seasons at colony level in a neotropical bat.Biology letters · 2024Article
- It's about time: Feeding competition costs of sociality are affected more by temporal characteristics than spatial distribution.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Federated inference and belief sharing.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- Individuals of a group-living shorebird show smaller home range overlap when food availability is low.Movement ecology · 2023Article
- Asynchrony rescues statistically optimal group decisions from information cascades through emergent leaders.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Habitat detection, habitat choice copying or mating benefits: What drives conspecific attraction in a nomadic songbird?The Journal of animal ecology · 2023Article
- The cost of social influence: Own-gender and gender-stereotype social learning biases in adolescents and adults.PloS one · 2023Article
- Individual exploration and selective social learning: balancing exploration-exploitation trade-offs in collective foraging.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Interindividual variation in the use of social information during learning in honeybees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Copy the In-group: Group Membership Trumps Perceived Reliability, Warmth, and Competence in a Social-Learning Task.Psychological science · 2022Article
14 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Research on social learning has focused traditionally on whether animals possess the cognitive ability to learn novel motor patterns from tutors. More recently, social learning has included the use of others as sources of inadvertent social information. This type of social learning seems more taxonomically widespread and its use can more readily be approached as an economic decision. Social sampling information, however, can be tricky to use and calls for a more lucid appraisal of its costs. In this four-part review, we address these costs. Firstly, we address the possibility that only a fraction of group members are actually providing social information at any one time. Secondly, we review experimental research which shows that animals are circumspect about social information use. Thirdly, we consider the cases where social information can lead to incorrect decisions and finally, we review studies investigating the effect of social information quality. We address the possibility that using social information or not is not a binary decision and present results of a study showing that nutmeg mannikins combine both sources of information, a condition that can lead to the establishment of informational cascades. We discuss the importance of empirically investigating the economics of social information use.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.