Abstract
Conformist transmission, defined as a disproportionate likelihood to copy the majority, is considered a potent mechanism underlying the emergence and stabilization of cultural diversity. However, ambiguity within and across disciplines remains as to how to identify conformist transmission empirically. In most studies, a population level outcome has been taken as the benchmark to evidence conformist transmission: a sigmoidal relation between individuals’ probability to copy the majority and the proportional majority size. Using an individual-based model, we show that, under ecologically plausible conditions, this sigmoidal relation can also be detected without equipping individuals with a conformist bias. Situations in which individuals copy randomly from a fixed subset of demonstrators in the population, or in which they have a preference for one of the possible variants, yield similar sigmoidal patterns as a conformist bias would. Our findings warrant a revisiting of studies that base their conformist transmission conclusions solely on the sigmoidal curve. More generally, our results indicate that population level outcomes interpreted as conformist transmission could potentially be explained by other individual-level strategies, and that more empirical support is needed to prove the existence of an individual-level conformist bias in human and other animals.
Highlights
Conformist transmission is considered a potent mechanism underlying the emergence and stabilization of human cultural diversity
This disproportionate tendency to copy the majority generates, at population level, a sigmoidal relation between the probability of copying the majority and the proportional majority size– “the sigmoid”. While it follows that a conformist bias (ILS) will result in the sigmoid (PLO), it is in an open issue under which assumptions it is correct to infer the existence of a conformist bias (ILS) from the sigmoid (PLO)
We first validated our model in the conditions Implicit knowledge and Rule of 3s. In the former condition, individuals have an implicit knowledge of the variants distribution in the population, and they adopt the majority variant with a probability greater than the proportional majority size[1]
Summary
Conformist transmission is considered a potent mechanism underlying the emergence and stabilization of human cultural diversity. Cultural evolution models adopt a precise definition of conformist transmission, which entails individuals having a disproportionate tendency to copy the majority ( “conformist bias”) This means that, to show a conformist bias, an individual should have a probability to copy the majority that is higher than the proportion of the majority itself. Conformist transmission has been shown, with formal models, to be sufficiently potent to maintain cultural diversity (see refs 1 and 2), and enable cultural group selection to shape the extended forms of cooperation and pro-sociality characteristic of the human species[3,4,5] This question is relevant as the empirical support for the existence of an individual-level conformist bias is not uncontroversial for humans (ref. 22, see ref. 23 for a recent review; see Discussion below) and even more so for the recent claims of conformity in non-human animals (refs 24–27 and Discussion below)
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