Abstract
Behavioral flexibility allows individuals to react to environmental changes, but changing established behavior carries costs, with unknown benefits. Individuals may thus modify their behavioral flexibility according to the prevailing circumstances. Social information provided by the performance level of others provides one possible cue to assess the potential benefits of changing behavior, since out-performance in similar circumstances indicates that novel behaviors (innovations) are potentially useful. We demonstrate that social performance cues, in the form of previous players’ scores in a problem-solving computer game, influence behavioral flexibility. Participants viewed only performance indicators, not the innovative behavior of others. While performance cues (high, low, or no scores) had little effect on innovation discovery rates, participants that viewed high scores increased their utilization of innovations, allowing them to exploit the virtual environment more effectively than players viewing low or no scores. Perceived conspecific performance can thus shape human decisions to adopt novel traits, even when the traits employed cannot be copied. This simple mechanism, social performance feedback, could be a driver of both the facultative adoption of innovations and cumulative cultural evolution, processes critical to human success.
Highlights
Novel behavior patterns – innovations – can provide benefits, such as the discovery of new resources or efficient ways to gather existing resources, but can carry risks and costs, such as injury, predation, poisoning, the chance of failure, or a time investment to acquire or perfect the innovative action (Bandura, 1977; Meeus and Oerlemans, 2000; Reader and Laland, 2003a; Rogers, 2003)
Social information provided by the performance level of others provides one possible cue to assess the potential benefits of changing behavior, since out-performance in similar circumstances indicates that novel behaviors are potentially useful
Social cues of high-performance increase performance, aspirations, and activity Players exposed to high-performance cues scored significantly more points than those exposed to low performance or no cues [points, high cued: Mdn = 2093, median absolute deviation (MAD) = 1623; low cued: Mdn = 1337, MAD = 431; without-cues: Mdn = 1183, MAD = 753; generalized linear models (GLMs): F(2, 61) = 5.7; p = 0.005; see Table 1 for treatment contrasts]
Summary
Novel behavior patterns – innovations – can provide benefits, such as the discovery of new resources or efficient ways to gather existing resources, but can carry risks and costs, such as injury, predation, poisoning, the chance of failure, or a time investment to acquire or perfect the innovative action (Bandura, 1977; Meeus and Oerlemans, 2000; Reader and Laland, 2003a; Rogers, 2003). Innovation is not per se beneficial, and so is likely to be flexibly employed depending on the state and circumstances of an individual, rather than or solely the result of a flash of creative inspiration. Evidence from both humans and non-human animals supports the view that innovation is a flexibly employed response (reviewed in Reader and Laland, 2003a). Animals and humans alike must trade-off the costs and benefits of behavioral change To optimize this trade-off, individuals may seek and benefit from environmental and social cues that innovation is a possible and appropriate action.
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