Abstract
Prestige-biased social learning occurs when individuals preferentially learn from others who are highly respected, admired, copied, or attended to in their group. This form of social learning is argued to reflect novel forms of social hierarchy in human societies, and, by providing an efficient short-cut to acquiring adaptive information, underpin the cumulative cultural evolution that has contributed to our species’ ecological success. Despite these potentially important consequences, little empirical work to date has tested the basic predictions of prestige-biased social learning. Here we provide evidence supporting the key predictions that prestige-biased social learning is used when it constitutes an indirect cue of success, and when success-biased social learning is unavailable. We ran an online experiment (n = 269) in which participants could copy each other in real-time to score points on a general-knowledge quiz. Our implementation of ‘prestige’ was the number of times someone had previously been copied by others. Importantly, prestige was an emergent property of participants’ behaviour during the experiment; no deception or manipulation of prestige was employed at any time. We found that, as predicted, participants used prestige-biased social learning when the prestige cue was an indirect cue of success, and when direct success information was unavailable. This highlights how people flexibly and adaptively employ social learning strategies based on the reliability of the information that such strategies provide.
Highlights
Prestige-biased social learning occurs when individuals preferentially learn from others who are highly respected, admired, copied, or attended to in their group
Prestige was defined as the number of times a participant was copied by others; no deception or manipulation of prestige cues was employed at any time
In this study we sought to experimentally test two key but previously untested assumptions underlying the theory of prestige-biased social learning[1]: that prestige information is only used when it provides a reliable signal of success, and that prestige information is only used when direct success information is unavailable
Summary
Prestige-biased social learning occurs when individuals preferentially learn from others who are highly respected, admired, copied, or attended to in their group This form of social learning is argued to reflect novel forms of social hierarchy in human societies, and, by providing an efficient short-cut to acquiring adaptive information, underpin the cumulative cultural evolution that has contributed to our species’ ecological success. Prestige-biased social learning occurs when individuals preferentially learn from others who are highly respected, admired, copied, or attended to in their group[1,2] This social learning bias is argued to reflect novel forms of social hierarchy in human s ocieties[1], and, by providing an efficient short-cut to acquiring adaptive information, to underpin the cumulative cultural evolution that has contributed to our species’ ecological success[3,4]. Studies of industrialised populations have found links between prestige as measured via questionnaire scales and knowledge/skill in lab tasks[15,16], but not examined whether such links emerge due to the social learning dynamics hypothesised by Henrich and Gil-White
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