ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2017
Social learning and the demise of costly cooperation in humans.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 63 citations in OpenAlex.
- Investigating the effects of social information on spite in an online game.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Expressed disapproval does not sustain long-term cooperation as effectively as costly punishment.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- The restart effect in social dilemmas shows humans are self-interested not altruistic.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Self-interested learning is more important than fair-minded conditional cooperation in public-goods games.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- A preference to learn from successful rather than common behaviours in human social dilemmas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 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
- Wealth-relative effects in cooperation games.Heliyon · 2019Article
- Evidence for strategic cooperation in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Social learning and the demise of costly cooperation in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Retrospective Self-Reported Childhood Experiences in Enriched Environments Uniquely Predict Prosocial Behavior and Personality Traits in Adulthood.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans have a sophisticated ability to learn from others, termed social learning, which has allowed us to spread over the planet, construct complex societies, and travel to the moon. It has been hypothesized that social learning has played a pivotal role in making human societies cooperative, by favouring cooperation even when it is not favoured by genetical selection. However, this hypothesis lacks direct experimental testing, and the opposite prediction has also been made, that social learning disfavours cooperation. We experimentally tested how different aspects of social learning affect the level of cooperation in public-goods games. We found that: (i) social information never increased cooperation and usually led to decreased cooperation; (ii) cooperation was lowest when individuals could observe how successful individuals behaved; and (iii) cooperation declined because individuals preferred to copy successful individuals, who cooperated less, rather than copy common behaviours. Overall, these results suggest that individuals use social information to try and improve their own success, and that this can lead to lower levels of cooperation.
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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.