Higher frequency of social learning in China than in the West shows cultural variation in the dynamics of cultural evolution.

Alex Mesoudi,Lei Chang,Keelin Murray,Hui Jing Lu

doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.2209

Abstract

Cultural evolutionary models have identified a range of conditions under which social learning (copying others) is predicted to be adaptive relative to asocial learning (learning on one's own), particularly in humans where socially learned information can accumulate over successive generations. However, cultural evolution and behavioural economics experiments have consistently shown apparently maladaptive under-utilization of social information in Western populations. Here we provide experimental evidence of cultural variation in people's use of social learning, potentially explaining this mismatch. People in mainland China showed significantly more social learning than British people in an artefact-design task designed to assess the adaptiveness of social information use. People in Hong Kong, and Chinese immigrants in the UK, resembled British people in their social information use, suggesting a recent shift in these groups from social to asocial learning due to exposure to Western culture. Finally, Chinese mainland participants responded less than other participants to increased environmental change within the task. Our results suggest that learning strategies in humans are culturally variable and not genetically fixed, necessitating the study of the ‘social learning of social learning strategies' whereby the dynamics of cultural evolution are responsive to social processes, such as migration, education and globalization.

Highlights

When is it adaptive to copy others, rather than go it alone? While social learning and social influence have been topics of longstanding interest in the social sciences [1,2], only recently have evolutionary anthropologists, biologists and psychologists examined the adaptive basis of social learning relative to asocial learning, using both formal theoretical models and controlled laboratory experiments in multiple species [3]
We compared four cultural groups varying along an East– West continuum in their use of social versus asocial learning to solve a challenging task designed to reflect real-life learning about complex, cognitively opaque technological artefacts, typical of our species’ cumulative culture
Throughout the first two seasons of hunting Chinese mainland (CM) participants copied significantly more than UK, Hong Kong (HK) and CI participants

Summary

Introduction

When is it adaptive to copy others, rather than go it alone? While social learning and social influence have been topics of longstanding interest in the social sciences [1,2], only recently have evolutionary anthropologists, biologists and psychologists examined the adaptive basis of social learning (copying solutions to problems from others) relative to asocial learning (solving problems independently, e.g. via trial-and-error), using both formal theoretical models and controlled laboratory experiments in multiple species [3]. We provide the first direct cross-cultural East–West comparison of the adaptiveness of human social learning, with no participant-deception and with a challenging task with no intuitively obvious solution This task is designed to reflect real-life learning about complex, cognitively opaque technological artefacts typical of cumulative culture, and has previously been shown to elicit lower-than-optimal levels of social learning in a Western sample [15]. Following a five-hunt asocial-learningonly practice session, there were three seasons of hunting, each comprising 30 hunts, or 30 opportunities to modify and test the arrowhead Participants improve their design either by trial-anderror asocial learning, i.e. modifying arrowhead attributes in response to changes in score over successive hunts, or social learning, i.e. copying the design of another participant. Quasi-binomial rather than binomial models were used for copying frequency data due to underdispersion [36] caused by many participants never copying

Results

Discussion