ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
The evolution of high-fidelity social learning.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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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
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Chimpanzee culture beyond the conspicuous: Evidence for broad-scale observational social learning in wild individuals.iScience · 2026Article
- Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Observational social learning of "know-how" and "know-what" in wild orangutans: evidence from nest-building skill acquisition.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The development of social attention in orangutans: Comparing peering behavior in wild and zoo-housed individuals.iScience · 2025Article
- In search of animal normativity: a framework for studying social norms in non-human animals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2024Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Capuchin monkeys learn to use information equally well from individual exploration and social demonstration.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Costly teaching contributes to the acquisition of spear hunting skill among BaYaka forager adolescents.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Observational
- Modeling Discontinuous Cultural Evolution: The Impact of Cross-Domain Transfer.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Copy the In-group: Group Membership Trumps Perceived Reliability, Warmth, and Competence in a Social-Learning Task.Psychological science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A defining feature of human culture is that knowledge and technology continually improve over time. Such cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) probably depends far more heavily on how reliably information is preserved than on how efficiently it is refined. Therefore, one possible reason that CCE appears diminished or absent in other species is that it requires accurate but specialized forms of social learning at which humans are uniquely adept. Here, we develop a Bayesian model to contrast the evolution of high-fidelity social learning, which supports CCE, against low-fidelity social learning, which does not. We find that high-fidelity transmission evolves when (1) social and (2) individual learning are inexpensive, (3) traits are complex, (4) individual learning is abundant, (5) adaptive problems are difficult and (6) behaviour is flexible. Low-fidelity transmission differs in many respects. It not only evolves when (2) individual learning is costly and (4) infrequent but also proves more robust when (3) traits are simple and (5) adaptive problems are easy. If conditions favouring the evolution of high-fidelity transmission are stricter (3 and 5) or harder to meet (2 and 4), this could explain why social learning is common, but CCE is rare.
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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.