ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Social information use and social information waste.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 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
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Own and others' confidence in social information use.iScience · 2026Article
- Adaptive yet suboptimal integration of advice in decision-making.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Article
- Social learning and exploration-exploitation dilemma in decision-making.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2026Review
- Developmental differences in social information use under uncertainty: A neurocomputational approach.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Decision-making preferences for intuition, deliberation, friends or crowds in independent and interdependent societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Neural correlates of Bayesian social belief updating in the medial prefrontal cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Individual differences in speed-accuracy trade-off influence social decision-making in dyads.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- When to stop social learning from a predecessor in an information-foraging task.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Experience and advice consequences shape information sharing strategies.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Humans flexibly integrate social information despite interindividual differences in reward.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Earlier social information has a stronger influence on judgments.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Investigating the effects of social information on spite in an online game.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- A meta-analysis of the weight of advice in decision-making.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2023Article
- Article
- Social influence in adolescence as a double-edged sword.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The role of reciprocity in human-robot social influence.iScience · 2021Article
- Maintenance of prior behaviour can enhance cultural selection.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Beyond social learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social information is immensely valuable. Yet we waste it. The information we get from observing other humans and from communicating with them is a cheap and reliable informational resource. It is considered the backbone of human cultural evolution. Theories and models focused on the evolution of social learning show the great adaptive benefits of evolving cognitive tools to process it. In spite of this, human adults in the experimental literature use social information quite inefficiently: they do not take it sufficiently into account. A comprehensive review of the literature on five experimental tasks documented 45 studies showing social information waste, and four studies showing social information being over-used. These studies cover 'egocentric discounting' phenomena as studied by social psychology, but also include experimental social learning studies. Social information waste means that human adults fail to give social information its optimal weight. Both proximal explanations and accounts derived from evolutionary theory leave crucial aspects of the phenomenon unaccounted for: egocentric discounting is a pervasive effect that no single unifying explanation fully captures. Cultural evolutionary theory's insistence on the power and benefits of social influence is to be balanced against this phenomenon. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.
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.