ArticleNature communications2018
Uncertainty about social interactions leads to the evolution of social heuristics.
Article in Nature communications, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 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
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Social identity and cooperation co-evolve in a multilevel public goods game.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Intolerance of Uncertainty Mediates the Relationship Between Social Anxiety and Problematic Smartphone Use Severity in College Students.Journal of personalized medicine · 2025Article
- The coevolution of cognition and sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Temporal context modulates the recovery of the attentional blink.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- The evolution of social behaviors and risk preferences in settings with uncertainty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Quality of life, mentalization, and perception of challenging patient encounters in dentistry: A cross-sectional study.BDJ open · 2023Article
- The form of uncertainty affects selection for social learning.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Dynamic influences on the neural encoding of social valence.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2022Review
- Classification of unlabeled online media.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Trinidadian guppies use a social heuristic that can support cooperation among non-kin.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The dual evolutionary foundations of political ideology.Nature human behaviour · 2020Review
- Gender-based pairings influence cooperative expectations and behaviours.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Resolving uncertainty in a social world.Nature human behaviour · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Individuals face many types of social interactions throughout their lives, but they often cannot perfectly assess what the consequences of their actions will be. Although it is known that unpredictable environments can profoundly affect the evolutionary process, it remains unclear how uncertainty about the nature of social interactions shapes the evolution of social behaviour. Here, we present an evolutionary simulation model, showing that even intermediate uncertainty leads to the evolution of simple cooperation strategies that disregard information about the social interaction ('social heuristics'). Moreover, our results show that the evolution of social heuristics can greatly affect cooperation levels, nearly doubling cooperation rates in our simulations. These results provide new insight into why social behaviour, including cooperation in humans, is often observed to be seemingly suboptimal. More generally, our results show that social behaviour that seems maladaptive when considered in isolation may actually be well-adapted to a heterogeneous and uncertain world.
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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.