Abstract
Individuals vary in their propensity to use social learning, the engine of cultural evolution, to acquire information about their environment. The causes of those differences, however, remain largely unclear. Using an agent-based model, we tested the hypothesis that as a result of reproductive skew differences in energetic requirements for reproduction affect the value of social information. We found that social learning is associated with lower variance in yield and is more likely to evolve in risk-averse low-skew populations than in high-skew populations. Reproductive skew may also result in sex differences in social information use, as empirical data suggest that females are often more risk-averse than males. To explore how risk may affect sex differences in learning strategies, we simulated learning in sexually reproducing populations where one sex experiences more reproductive skew than the other. When both sexes compete for the same resources, they tend to adopt extreme strategies: the sex with greater reproductive skew approaches pure individual learning and the other approaches pure social learning. These results provide insight into the conditions that promote individual and species level variation in social learning and so may affect cultural evolution.
Highlights
Social learning plays a central role in the emergence of traditions and the evolution of culture, as it allows locally adaptive information and behavioural traits to spread across a population [1]
To investigate whether differences in the function that relates collected resources to reproductive success affect the optimal use of social information, we extended a previously published model of social learning to include reproductive skew [46]
As variance in collected resources is a common measure of risk sensitivity, our results suggest that social learning is a risk-averse strategy, whereas individual learning is a risk-prone strategy
Summary
Social learning plays a central role in the emergence of traditions and the evolution of culture, as it allows locally adaptive information and behavioural traits to spread across a population [1]. To investigate whether differences in the function that relates collected resources to reproductive success affect the optimal use of social information, we extended a previously published model of social learning to include reproductive skew [46]. We modelled sexes because these provide a case where individuals in the same population have different foraging objectives to maximize their fitness, i.e. either maximizing resource return or minimizing risk of energetic shortfall. In the electronic supplementary material, appendix B, we show that our results hold when the probability that an individual in the top b proportion of the population reproduced is proportional to its fitness proxy (relative income criterion) This might represent situations when reproduction is socially constrained and requires successful competition for partners, and the most competitive or high ranking individuals with good body conditions are most able to reproduce [53,54]. Each offspring’s social learning propensity mutates to the opposite value (i.e. an a of 1 becomes 0, or vice versa) with probability m 1⁄4 1/N
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