ArticleNature human behaviour2025
Feature-based reward learning shapes human social learning strategies.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 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.
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.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Payoff selectivity drives collective intelligence during dynamic resource tracking in humans.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Review
- Social learning and exploration-exploitation dilemma in decision-making.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2026Review
- Traditionalism mediates social learning: Biases in acceptance of novel health interventions among Himba pastoralists.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2026Article
- How social learning enhances-or undermines-efficiency and flexibility in collective decision-making under uncertainty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Wild jackdaws learn to tolerate juveniles to exploit new foraging opportunities.Biology letters · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Human adaptation depends on individuals strategically choosing whom to learn from. A mosaic of social learning strategies-such as copying majorities or successful others-has been identified. Influential theories conceive of these strategies as fixed heuristics, independent of experience. However, such accounts cannot explain the flexibility and individual variability prevalent in social learning. Here we advance a domain-general reward learning framework that provides a unifying mechanistic account of pivotal social learning strategies. We first formalize how individuals learn to associate social features (for example, others' behaviour or success) with reward. Across six experiments (n = 1,941), we show that people flexibly adjust their social learning in response to experienced rewards. Agent-based simulations further demonstrate how this learning process gives rise to key social learning strategies across a range of environments. Our findings suggest that people learn how to learn from others, enabling adaptive knowledge to spread dynamically throughout societies.
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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.