Maintenance of prior behaviour can enhance cultural selection

Bradley Walker,Nicolas Fay,José Segovia Martín,Monica Tamariz

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-99340-7

Bradley Walker, Nicolas Fay + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-99340-7

Copy DOI

Abstract

Many cultural phenomena evolve through a Darwinian process whereby adaptive variants are selected and spread at the expense of competing variants. While cultural evolutionary theory emphasises the importance of social learning to this process, experimental studies indicate that people’s dominant response is to maintain their prior behaviour. In addition, while payoff-biased learning is crucial to Darwinian cultural evolution, learner behaviour is not always guided by variant payoffs. Here, we use agent-based modelling to investigate the role of maintenance in Darwinian cultural evolution. We vary the degree to which learner behaviour is payoff-biased (i.e., based on critical evaluation of variant payoffs), and compare three uncritical (non-payoff-biased) strategies that are used alongside payoff-biased learning: copying others, innovating new variants, and maintaining prior variants. In line with previous research, we show that some level of payoff-biased learning is crucial for populations to converge on adaptive cultural variants. Importantly, when combined with payoff-biased learning, uncritical maintenance leads to stronger population-level adaptation than uncritical copying or innovation, highlighting the importance of maintenance to cultural selection. This advantage of maintenance as a default learning strategy may help explain why it is a common human behaviour.

Highlights

Many cultural phenomena evolve through a Darwinian process whereby adaptive variants are selected and spread at the expense of competing variants
Asocial learning can be considered payoff-biased, in the sense that it involves switching between innovation and maintenance based on variant payoffs
In line with previous research, we show that some level of payoff-biased learning is crucial for populations to converge on adaptive variants

Summary

Introduction

Many cultural phenomena evolve through a Darwinian process whereby adaptive variants are selected and spread at the expense of competing variants. When combined with payoff-biased learning, uncritical maintenance leads to stronger population-level adaptation than uncritical copying or innovation, highlighting the importance of maintenance to cultural selection This advantage of maintenance as a default learning strategy may help explain why it is a common human behaviour. Small groups of human participants produce material or symbolic artefacts such as stone tools12, arrowheads[13,14,15], paper planes[16,17] and communication systems[18,19,20] that adaptively improve over time When learning in these studies, and in general, people can switch between three basic strategies: they can copy a variant from someone else (copying), innovate a new variant (innovation), or reuse a prior variant (maintenance). There is evidence that people do not always evaluate variant payoffs, declining

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion