ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Individual consistency and flexibility in human social information use.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Individual differences in speed-accuracy trade-off influence social decision-making in dyads.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The coevolution of cognition and sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Adaptive mechanisms of social and asocial learning in immersive collective foraging.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Unpredictable benefits of social information can lead to the evolution of individual differences in social learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Brain structure correlates of social information use: an exploratory machine learning approach.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Unravelling the many facets of human cooperation in an experimental study.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Increased initial task difficulty drives social foragers to develop sub-optimal conformity instead of adaptive diversity.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Cooperative and conformist behavioural preferences predict the dual dimensions of political ideology.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Brain Systems Underlying Fundamental Motivations of Human Social Conformity.Neuroscience bulletin · 2023Review
- Sensitivity to Evidential Dependencies in Judgments Under Uncertainty.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- Social learning dynamics influence performance and career self-efficacy in career-oriented educational virtual environments.PloS one · 2022Article
- Does social influence affect COVID-19 vaccination intention among the unvaccinated?Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- What is the extent of a frequency-dependent social learning strategy space?Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Social Prevalence Is Rationally Integrated in Belief Updating.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
- Trusting and learning from others: immediate and long-term effects of learning from observation and advice.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Copying others appears to be a cost-effective way of obtaining adaptive information, particularly when flexibly employed. However, adult humans differ considerably in their propensity to use information from others, even when this 'social information' is beneficial, raising the possibility that stable individual differences constrain flexibility in social information use. We used two dissimilar decision-making computer games to investigate whether individuals flexibly adjusted their use of social information to current conditions or whether they valued social information similarly in both games. Participants also completed established personality questionnaires. We found that participants demonstrated considerable flexibility, adjusting social information use to current conditions. In particular, individuals employed a 'copy-when-uncertain' social learning strategy, supporting a core, but untested, assumption of influential theoretical models of cultural transmission. Moreover, participants adjusted the amount invested in their decision based on the perceived reliability of personally gathered information combined with the available social information. However, despite this strategic flexibility, participants also exhibited consistent individual differences in their propensities to use and value social information. Moreover, individuals who favoured social information self-reported as more collectivist than others. We discuss the implications of our results for social information use and cultural transmission.
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