ArticleEvolutionary human sciences2025
The evolution of similarity-biased social learning.
Article in Evolutionary human sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contagion and escalation of rule violations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- A demographic theory of similarity-biased social learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- How to Increase Children's and Adults' Interest in Learning From Disagreement.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Risk perception is unlikely to drive underuse of social information in lab studies.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Traditionalism mediates social learning: Biases in acceptance of novel health interventions among Himba pastoralists.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2026Article
- The evolution of identity signals for co-ordination in diverse societies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- The cultural evolution of distortion in music (and other norms of mixed appeal).Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Humans often learn preferentially from ingroup members who share a social identity affiliation, while ignoring or rejecting information when it comes from someone perceived to be from an outgroup. This sort of bias has well-known negative consequences - exacerbating cultural divides, polarization, and conflict - while reducing the information available to learners. Why does it persist? Using evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that similarity-biased social learning (also called parochial social learning) is adaptive when (1) individual learning is error-prone and (2) sufficient diversity inhibits the efficacy of social learning that ignores identity signals, as long as (3) those signals are sufficiently reliable indicators of adaptive behaviour. We further show that our results are robust to considerations of other social learning strategies, focusing on conformist and pay-off-biased transmission. We conclude by discussing the consequences of our analyses for understanding diversity in the modern world.
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Registered trials
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