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Abstract
Social learning provides an effective route to gaining up-to-date information, particularly when information is costly to obtain asocially. Theoretical work predicts that the willingness to switch between using asocial and social sources of information will vary between individuals according to their risk tolerance. We tested the prediction that, where there are sex differences in risk tolerance, altering the variance of the payoffs of using asocial and social information differentially influences the probability of social information use by sex. In a computer-based task that involved building a virtual spaceship, men and women (N = 88) were given the option of using either asocial or social sources of information to improve their performance. When the asocial option was risky (i.e., the participant’s score could markedly increase or decrease) and the social option was safe (i.e., their score could slightly increase or remain the same), women, but not men, were more likely to use the social option than the asocial option. In all other conditions, both women and men preferentially used the asocial option to a similar degree. We therefore found both a sex difference in risk aversion and a sex difference in the preference for social information when relying on asocial information was risky, consistent with the hypothesis that levels of risk-aversion influence the use of social information.
Highlights
Individuals can acquire information either directly through their own asocial learning experiences or by copying other individuals (Hoppitt & Laland, 2013)
Women in the Asocial Risky (AR) condition chose the social source of information more than women in the C condition, while men in the AR condition did not differ from men in the C condition with regard to their choice
Our results showed that both men and women used asocial, rather than social, sources of information when both sources were safe, consistent with previous experiments showing the preferential use of asocial learning in laboratory settings (e.g., Morgan et al, 2012; Mesoudi, 2011)
Summary
Individuals can acquire information either directly through their own asocial learning experiences or by copying other individuals (Hoppitt & Laland, 2013). Asocial learning allows individuals to gain first-hand knowledge about the immediate environment, but reliance on this type of learning can be costly, for instance, in terms of time and energy (Kendal et al, 2005). Social learning can provide a cost-effective route to gaining up-to-date information, when the environment is changing and information is costly to obtain asocially (Kendal et al, 2005; Boyd & Richerson, 1985).
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