ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2011
How copying affects the amount, evenness and persistence of cultural knowledge: insights from the social learning strategies tournament.
Article 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 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years.PloS one · 2025Article
- The refinement paradox and cumulative cultural evolution: Complex products of collective improvement favor conformist outcomes, blind copying, and hyper-credulity.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- The transition from animal to human culture-simulating the social protocell hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- How social learning shapes the efficacy of preventative health behaviors in an outbreak.PloS one · 2022Article
- Divide and conquer: intermediate levels of population fragmentation maximize cultural accumulation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Identifying early modern human ecological niche expansions and associated cultural dynamics in the South African Middle Stone Age.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Conformity does not perpetuate suboptimal traditions in a wild population of songbirds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Evaluating reproductive decisions as discrete choices under social influence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Social learning and the replication process: an experimental investigation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2015Article
- Dancing bees improve colony foraging success as long-term benefits outweigh short-term costs.PloS one · 2014Article
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- Exploring the costs and benefits of social information use: an appraisal of current experimental evidence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Review
- On the nature of cultural transmission networks: evidence from Fijian villages for adaptive learning biases.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Article
- What drives the evolution of hunter-gatherer subsistence technology? A reanalysis of the risk hypothesis with data from the Pacific Northwest.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Article
- Culture evolves.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
Darwinian processes should favour those individuals that deploy the most effective strategies for acquiring information about their environment. We organized a computer-based tournament to investigate which learning strategies would perform well in a changing environment. The most successful strategies relied almost exclusively on social learning (here, learning a behaviour performed by another individual) rather than asocial learning, even when environments were changing rapidly; moreover, successful strategies focused learning effort on periods of environmental change. Here, we use data from tournament simulations to examine how these strategies might affect cultural evolution, as reflected in the amount of culture (i.e. number of cultural traits) in the population, the distribution of cultural traits across individuals, and their persistence through time. We found that high levels of social learning are associated with a larger amount of more persistent knowledge, but a smaller amount of less persistent expressed behaviour, as well as more uneven distributions of behaviour, as individuals concentrated on exploiting a smaller subset of behaviour patterns. Increased rates of environmental change generated increases in the amount and evenness of behaviour. These observations suggest that copying confers on cultural populations an adaptive plasticity, allowing them to respond to changing environments rapidly by drawing on a wider knowledge base.
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