ArticlePloS one2021
Trusting the experts: The domain-specificity of prestige-biased social learning.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 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
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Authority endorsements backfire and social norms fail to increase vaccination intent in post-COVID Kazakhstan.SSM - population health · 2026Article
- Rank and payoff biases influence subject choices in a foraging task among sanctuary chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Human prestige psychology can promote adaptive inequality in social influence.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Traditionalism mediates social learning: Biases in acceptance of novel health interventions among Himba pastoralists.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2026Article
- Prestige bias drives the viral spread of content reposted by influencers in online communities.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Positive sentiment and expertise predict the diffusion of archaeological content on social media.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Prestige and gender role ideology: a study of young Tanzanian men.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- The Relationship Between Face-Based First Impressions and Perceptions of Purity and Compared to Other Moral Violations.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Context dependent preferences in prestige bias learning about vaccination in rural Namibian pastoralists.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2024Article
- Trade-offs, control conditions, and alternative designs in the experimental study of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Review
- Humans flexibly integrate social information despite interindividual differences in reward.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Article
- Formalising prestige bias: Differences between models with first-order and second-order cues.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- The experimental evolution of human culture: flexibility, fidelity and environmental instability.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Trusting and learning from others: immediate and long-term effects of learning from observation and advice.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Watch and Learn: Vicarious Threat Learning across Human Development.Brain sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prestige-biased social learning (henceforth "prestige-bias") occurs when individuals predominantly choose to learn from a prestigious member of their group, i.e. someone who has gained attention, respect and admiration for their success in some domain. Prestige-bias is proposed as an adaptive social-learning strategy as it provides a short-cut to identifying successful group members, without having to assess each person's success individually. Previous work has documented prestige-bias and verified that it is used adaptively. However, the domain-specificity and generality of prestige-bias has not yet been explicitly addressed experimentally. By domain-specific prestige-bias we mean that individuals choose to learn from a prestigious model only within the domain of expertise in which the model acquired their prestige. By domain-general prestige-bias we mean that individuals choose to learn from prestigious models in general, regardless of the domain in which their prestige was earned. To distinguish between domain specific and domain general prestige we ran an online experiment (n = 397) in which participants could copy each other to score points on a general-knowledge quiz with varying topics (domains). Prestige in our task was an emergent property of participants' copying behaviour. We found participants overwhelmingly preferred domain-specific (same topic) prestige cues to domain-general (across topic) prestige cues. However, when only domain-general or cross-domain (different topic) cues were available, participants overwhelmingly favoured domain-general cues. Finally, when given the choice between cross-domain prestige cues and randomly generated Player IDs, participants favoured cross-domain prestige cues. These results suggest participants were sensitive to the source of prestige, and that they preferred domain-specific cues even though these cues were based on fewer samples (being calculated from one topic) than the domain-general cues (being calculated from all topics). We suggest that the extent to which people employ a domain-specific or domain-general prestige-bias may depend on their experience and understanding of the relationships between domains.
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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.