ArticleNature communications2024
Unpredictable benefits of social information can lead to the evolution of individual differences in social learning.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 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
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Feature-based reward learning shapes human social learning strategies.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- The flexibility of social learning and its conservation implications in mammals and beyond.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The coevolution of learning schedules and teaching enhances cumulative knowledge and drives a teacher-innovator syndrome.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- When misunderstanding meets artificial intelligence: the critical role of trust in human-AI and human-human team communication and performance.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human ecological success is often attributed to our capacity for social learning, which facilitates the spread of adaptive behaviours through populations. All humans rely on social learning to acquire culture, but there is substantial variation across societies, between individuals and over developmental time. However, it is unclear why these differences exist. Here, we present an evolutionary model showing that individual variation in social learning can emerge if the benefits of social learning are unpredictable. Unpredictability selects for flexible developmental programmes that allow individuals to update their reliance on social learning based on previous experiences. This developmental flexibility, in turn, causes some individuals in a population to end up consistently relying more heavily on social learning than others. We demonstrate this core evolutionary mechanism across three scenarios of increasing complexity, investigating the impact of different sources of uncertainty about the usefulness of social learning. Our results show how evolution can shape how individuals learn to learn from others, with potentially profound effects on cultural diversity.
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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.