Cultural evolution of football tactics: strategic social learning in managers' choice of formation.

Alex Mesoudi

doi:10.1017/ehs.2020.27

Abstract

In order to adaptively solve complex problems or make difficult decisions, people must strategically combine personal information acquired directly from experience (individual learning) and social information acquired from others (social learning). The game of football (soccer) provides extensive real world data with which to quantify this strategic information use. I analyse a 5-year dataset of all games (n = 9127, 2012-2017) in five top European leagues to quantify the extent to which a manager's initial formation is guided by their personal past use or success with that formation, or other managers' use or success with that formation. I focus on the 4231 formation, the dominant formation during this period. As predicted, a manager's choice of whether to use 4231 is influenced by both their recent use of 4231 (personal information) and the use of 4231 in the entire population of managers in that division (social information). Against expectations, managers relied more on personal than social information, although this estimate was highly variable across managers and divisions. Finally, there did not appear to be an adaptive tradeoff between social and personal information use, with the relative reliance on each failing to predict managerial success.

Highlights

When solving problems or making decisions, people use a combination of personal information acquired directly from the environment and social information acquired by copying others (Boyd & Richerson, 1985, 1995; Enquist, Eriksson, & Ghirlanda, 2007; Kendal et al, 2018; Laland, 2004; Perreault, Moya, & Boyd, 2012; Rogers, 1988)
Complex decisions often require the strategic combination of personal information acquired via individual learning and population-wide information acquired via social learning, each of which has distinct advantages and disadvantages
Beheim et al (2014) analysed decades of games of Go to show that professional Go players combine personal and social information when deciding on opening moves, and these individual-level strategic decisions generated long-term evolutionary dynamics

Summary

Introduction

When solving problems or making decisions, people use a combination of personal information acquired directly from the environment (individual learning) and social information acquired by copying others (social learning) (Boyd & Richerson, 1985, 1995; Enquist, Eriksson, & Ghirlanda, 2007; Kendal et al, 2018; Laland, 2004; Perreault, Moya, & Boyd, 2012; Rogers, 1988). Beheim, Thigpen & McElreath (2014) provided an innovative demonstration of the strategic use of social and individual learning in the real world They analysed decades of professional matches of the board game Go to understand the spread of an opening move, the ‘Fourfour’. They showed considerable between-player variation, with some players using predominantly social information (e.g. Lee Sedol) and others using mostly personal information (e.g. Takemiya Masaki, the originator of the modern Fourfour)

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