Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Focus on the success of others leads to selfish behavior.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Intranasal oxytocin decreases self-oriented learning.Psychopharmacology · 2021Trial
- Trial
- Article
- Feature-based reward learning shapes human social learning strategies.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Unpredictable benefits of social information can lead to the evolution of individual differences in social learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Cooperation among unequal players with aspiration-driven learning.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- The majority of Canadians likely behaved as myopic rationalists rather than success-based learners when deciding on their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- A preference to learn from successful rather than common behaviours in human social dilemmas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Maintenance of prior behaviour can enhance cultural selection.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Aspiration dynamics generate robust predictions in heterogeneous populations.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Ten recent insights for our understanding of cooperation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Review
- Juvenile cleaner fish can socially learn the consequences of cheating.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Cultural group selection and human cooperation: a conceptual and empirical review.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Review
- Acculturation orientations affect the evolution of a multicultural society.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Subsistence styles shape human social learning strategies.Nature human behaviour · 2017Article
- Social learning and the demise of costly cooperation in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Assortment, but not knowledge of assortment, affects cooperation and individual success in human groups.PloS one · 2017Article
- Human cooperation in groups: variation begets variation.Scientific reports · 2015Article
- Propensity to Punish in High Psychopathy may Promote Cooperation: Human and Computer Prisoner Dilemma Experiments.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has often been argued that the spectacular cognitive capacities of humans are the result of selection for the ability to gather, process, and use information about other people. Recent studies show that humans strongly and consistently differ in what type of social information they are interested in. Although some individuals mainly attend to what the majority is doing (frequency-based learning), others focus on the success that their peers achieve with their behavior (success-based learning). Here, we show that such differences in social learning have important consequences for the outcome of social interactions. We report on a decision-making experiment in which individuals were first classified as frequency- and success-based learners and subsequently grouped according to their learning strategy. When confronted with a social dilemma situation, groups of frequency-based learners cooperated considerably more than groups of success-based learners. A detailed analysis of the decision-making process reveals that these differences in cooperation are a direct result of the differences in information use. Our results show that individual differences in social learning strategies are crucial for understanding social behavior.
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.