Abstract
Studies in cultural evolution have uncovered many types of social learning strategies that are adaptive in certain environments. The efficiency of these strategies also depends on the individual characteristics of both the observer and the demonstrator. We investigate the relationship between intelligence and the ways social and individual information is utilised to make decisions in an uncertain environment. We measure fluid intelligence and study experimentally how individuals learn from observing the choices of a demonstrator in a 2-armed bandit problem with changing probabilities of a reward. Participants observe a demonstrator with high or low fluid intelligence. In some treatments they are aware of the intelligence score of the demonstrator and in others they are not. Low fluid intelligence individuals imitate the demonstrator more when her fluid intelligence is known than when it is not. Conversely, individuals with high fluid intelligence adjust their use of social information, as the observed behaviour changes, independently of the knowledge of the intelligence of the demonstrator. We provide evidence that intelligence determines how social and individual information is integrated in order to make choices in a changing uncertain environment.
Highlights
Learning is an important and flexible process that allows humans to adapt to their environment
A more strategic use of social information involves understanding the rationale behind the observed choices[6,13,28,29,30]
Studies in cultural evolution literature find a variation in social learning strategies that depends on social group and individual characteristics[13,32,41,42]
Summary
Learning is an important and flexible process that allows humans to adapt to their environment. Studies in cultural evolution literature find a variation in social learning strategies that depends on social group and individual characteristics[13,32,41,42] Having these findings in mind, we hypothesize that low fluid intelligence participants have a relatively high cost of learning, which implies that it should be difficult for them to perform efficiently in the task and, as a consequence, hard to interpret the observed actions of the demonstrator when her competence is unknown. This should lead to low confidence, low efficiency, and, as a result, strong dependence of the imitation rate on the information about the demonstrator’s intelligence (prestige bias). Participants were not aware of the relation between the Raven score and the performance of the demonstrator in the learning task
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