Abstract
Humans owe their ecological success to their great capacities for social learning and cooperation: learning from others helps individuals adjust to their environment and can promote cooperation in groups. Classic and recent studies indicate that the cultural organization of societies shapes the influence of social information on decision making and suggest that collectivist values (prioritizing the group relative to the individual) increase tendencies to conform to the majority. However, it is unknown whether and how societal background impacts social learning in cooperative interactions. Here we show that social learning in cooperative decision making systematically varies across two societies. We experimentally compare people's basic propensities for social learning in samples from a collectivist (China) and an individualist society (United Kingdom; total n = 540) in a social dilemma and a coordination game. We demonstrate that Chinese participants base their cooperation decisions on information about their peers much more frequently than their British counterparts. Moreover, our results reveal remarkable societal differences in the type of peer information people consider. In contrast to the consensus view, Chinese participants tend to be substantially less majority-oriented than the British. While Chinese participants are inclined to adopt peer behavior that leads to higher payoffs, British participants tend to cooperate only if sufficiently many peers do so too. These results indicate that the basic processes underlying social transmission are not universal; rather, they vary with cultural conditions. As success-based learning is associated with selfish behavior and majority-based learning can help foster cooperation, our study suggests that in different societies social learning can play diverging roles in the emergence and maintenance of cooperation.
Highlights
The adaptability of humans largely depends on their social nature (Boyd, Richerson, & Henrich, 2011; Henrich, 2015)
In each of the interaction settings, aggregate behavioral dynamics accorded with the underlying payoff structures, with most groups approaching the Nash equilibria over time
We focus on patterns of variation between countries and between cities within countries, comparing social learning strategies in cooperative decision making in the social dilemma and the coordination game
Summary
The adaptability of humans largely depends on their social nature (Boyd, Richerson, & Henrich, 2011; Henrich, 2015). Two prominent strategies are payoff-based learning (Schlag, 1998), in which people imitate successful peers, and majority-based learning (Boyd & Richerson, 1985), where people tend to conform to locally common behavior These social learning strategies can have profound consequences for the dynamics of cooperation in groups (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Burton-Chellew, El Mouden, & West, 2017; BurtonChellew, Nax, & West, 2015; Lehmann & Feldman, 2008; Lehmann, Feldman, & Foster, 2008; Molleman, Pen, & Weissing, 2013; Molleman, Quiñones, & Weissing, 2013; van den Berg, Molleman, & Weissing, 2015). When individuals in a group mutually benefit from coordinating their behavior, the relative frequencies of payoff-based and majoritybased social learning can affect the outcome of social interactions and change the stability of equilibria by altering their basins of attraction
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