Evolution Of Social Learning Research Articles

Coordination in social learning: expanding the narrative on the evolution of social norms

A shared narrative in the literature on the evolution of cooperation maintains that social learning evolves early to allow for the transmission of cumulative culture. Social norms, whilst present at the outset, only rise to prominence later on, mainly to stabilise cooperation against the threat of defection. In contrast, I argue that once we consider insights from social epistemology, an expansion of this narrative presents itself: An interesting kind of social norm — an epistemic coordination norm — was operative in early and important instances of specialised social learning. I show how there’s a need for such norms in two key social learning strategies and explain how this need is constituted. In assessor-teaching (e.g. Castro et al., 2019b, 2021), epistemic coordination norms allow agents to coordinate around the content of social learning, i.e., what is to be known and how this is to be done. These norms also allow agents to coordinate around the form of cultural learning in what’s sometimes called strategic social learning (Laland, 2004; Hoppitt & Laland, 2013; Heyes, 2018, Chap. 5) and elsewhere. Broadly speaking, this concerns how cultural learning is organised within the social group. The upshot is that the evolution of social learning and social norms are intertwined in important and underappreciated ways from early on. The above matters as it informs our views about the evolution of social norms more generally. Truly social norms emerged to coordinate a plurality of complex behaviours and interactions, amongst them specialised social learning. I substantiate this view by contrasting it with Jonathan Birch’s views on the evolution of norms. What results is a general but cohesive narrative on the early evolution of social norms.

SLE2: The Improved Social Learning Evolution Model of Cloud Manufacturing Service Ecosystem

As a new form of manufacturing in the industrial Internet era, cloud manufacturing service ecosystem (CMSE) can meet complex customization needs through a dynamic collaborative network between cloud manufacturing services. The source of cloud manufacturing service is social, and such sociality aggravates the uncertainty and dynamics of CMSE. This poses new challenges to the analysis of CMSE's evolution. The existing model social learning evolution (SLE) model only analyzes manufacturing service ecosystem from the perspective of individuals and lacks research on the organizational structure among individuals. In this article, we propose the improved model (SLE2) from a system perspective, which reconstructed the three layers of the SLE model: the individual layer describes the learning and evolution characteristics of service agents; the organization layer describes the competition and cooperation among service agents; and the social layer describes the value-driven social network operation mode. Finally, the article verifies that the SLE2 model is effective through computational experimental results.

Social behavior mediates the use of social and personal information in wild jays

The factors favoring the evolution of certain cognitive abilities in animals remain unclear. Social learning is a cognitive ability that reduces the cost of acquiring personal information and forms the foundation for cultural behavior. Theory predicts the evolutionary pressures to evolve social learning should be greater in more social species. However, research testing this theory has primarily occurred in captivity, where artificial environments can affect performance and yield conflicting results. We compared the use of social and personal information, and the social learning mechanisms used by wild, asocial California scrub-jays and social Mexican jays. We trained demonstrators to solve one door on a multi-door task, then measured the behavior of naïve conspecifics towards the task. If social learning occurs, observations of demonstrators will change the rate that naïve individuals interact with each door. We found both species socially learned, though personal information had a much greater effect on behavior in the asocial species while social information was more important for the social species. Additionally, both species used social information to avoid, rather than copy, conspecifics. Our findings demonstrate that while complex social group structures may be unnecessary for the evolution of social learning, it does affect the use of social versus personal information.

Evolution of Social Learning with Payoff and Content Bias

There has been much theoretical work aimed at understanding the evolution of social learning; and in most of it, individual and social learning are treated as distinct processes. A number of authors have argued that this approach is faulty because the same psychological mechanisms underpin social and individual learning. In previous work, we analyzed a simple model in which both individual and social learning are the result of a single learning process. Here, we extend this approach by showing how payoff and content biases evolve. We show that payoff bias leads to higher average fitness when environments are noisy and change rapidly. Content bias always evolves when the expected fitness benefits of alternative traits differ.

The Role of the Learner in the Cultural Evolution of Vocalizations.

As a uniquely human behavior, language is crucial to our understanding of ourselves and of the world around us. Despite centuries of research into how languages have historically developed and how people learn them, fully understanding the origin and evolution of language remains an ongoing challenge. In parallel, researchers have studied the divergence of birdsong in vocal-learning songbirds to uncover broader patterns of cultural evolution. One approach to studying cultural change over time, adapted from biology, focuses on the transmission of socially learned traits, including language, in a population. By studying how learning and the distribution of cultural traits interact at the population level, we can better understand the processes that underlie cultural evolution. Here, we take a two-fold approach to understanding the cultural evolution of vocalizations, with a focus on the role of the learner in cultural transmission. First, we explore previous research on the evolution of social learning, focusing on recent progress regarding the origin and ongoing cultural evolution of both language and birdsong. We then use a spatially explicit population model to investigate the coevolution of culture and learning preferences, with the assumption that selection acts directly on cultural phenotypes and indirectly on learning preferences. Our results suggest that the spatial distribution of learned behaviors can cause unexpected evolutionary patterns of learning. We find that, intuitively, selection for rare cultural phenotypes can indirectly favor a novelty-biased learning strategy. In contrast, selection for common cultural phenotypes leads to cultural homogeneity; we find that there is no selective pressure on learning strategy without cultural variation. Thus, counterintuitively, selection for common cultural traits does not consistently favor conformity bias, and novelty bias can stably persist in this cultural context. We propose that the evolutionary dynamics of learning preferences and cultural biases can depend on the existing variation of learned behaviors, and that this interaction could be important to understanding the origin and evolution of cultural systems such as language and birdsong. Selection acting on learned behaviors may indirectly impose counterintuitive selective pressures on learning strategies, and understanding the cultural landscape is crucial to understanding how patterns of learning might change over time.

The evolution of social learning as phenotypic cue integration.

Most analyses of the origins of cultural evolution focus on when and where social learning prevails over individual learning, overlooking the fact that there are other developmental inputs that influence phenotypic fit to the selective environment. This raises the question of how the presence of other cue 'channels' affects the scope for social learning. Here, we present a model that considers the simultaneous evolution of (i) multiple forms of social learning (involving vertical or horizontal learning based on either prestige or conformity biases) within the broader context of other evolving inputs on phenotype determination, including (ii) heritable epigenetic factors, (iii) individual learning, (iv) environmental and cascading maternal effects, (v) conservative bet-hedging, and (vi) genetic cues. In fluctuating environments that are autocorrelated (and hence predictable), we find that social learning from members of the same generation (horizontal social learning) explains the large majority of phenotypic variation, whereas other cues are much less important. Moreover, social learning based on prestige biases typically prevails in positively autocorrelated environments, whereas conformity biases prevail in negatively autocorrelated environments. Only when environments are unpredictable or horizontal social learning is characterized by an intrinsically low information content, other cues such as conservative bet-hedging or vertical prestige biases prevail. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.

Social learning of arbitrary food preferences in bonobos

A fruitful approach to investigate social learning in animals is based on paradigms involving the manipulation of artefacts. However, tool use and elaborate object manipulations are rare in natural conditions, suggesting that social learning evolved in other contexts where fitness consequences are higher, such as discriminating palatable from noxious foods, recognising predators or understanding social hierarchies. We focussed on one such context by investigating whether bonobos socially learned others’ arbitrary food preferences through mere observation. To this end, we trained two demonstrators to prefer or avoid distinctly coloured food items, treated with either a sweet or bitter agent. Demonstrators then displayed their newly acquired preferences in front of naïve subjects. In subsequent choice tests, subjects generally matched their choices to the demonstrators’ preferred food colours, despite having already tasted the equally palatable colour alternative. Both age and exposure to demonstrator preference had a significant positive effect on the proportion of matched choices. Moreover, in a context where errors can be costly, social learning was instant insofar as six of seven subjects used socially learned information to influence their very first food choice. We discuss these findings in light of the current debate on the evolution of social learning in animals.

Social Learning Evolution (SLE): Computational Experiment-Based Modeling Framework of Social Manufacturing

As a new form of manufacturing industry in the Internet era, social manufacturing has its inherent “social-cyber” complexity: the source of manufacturing service is social, and such sociality aggravates the diversity, uncertainty, and dynamics of service supply. This poses new challenges to the service matching between supply-side and demand-side. In order to meet this challenge, it is necessary to conduct a complexity analysis of social manufacturing. Traditional researches mainly rely on data statistics and macro analysis, in which there are difficulties in clearly identifying the links between various impact factors and macro evolution phenomena. In order to change such a situation, this paper proposes a modeling framework of social manufacturing from the aspect of social learning evolution (SLE), including individual evolution model, organizational learning model, and social learning model. Based on the SLE framework, the corresponding computational experiment system is built to analyze the complexity of social manufacturing. The performance of several evolution mechanisms in social manufacturing is simulated and compared as a case study to present the application of SLE framework. The results demonstrate that our method has a substantial promise.

The evolution of social learning and its economic consequences

We use an evolutionary model to simulate agents who choose between two options with stochastically varying payoffs. Two types of agents are considered: individual learners, who rely on trial-and-error methods, and social learners, who imitate the wealthiest sampled individual. Agents adapt to changing environments within one generation by using their respective learning strategy. The frequency of the agent types adapts between generations according to the agents’ acquired wealth. During the course of evolution, social learning becomes dominant, resulting in three major effects: First, for better or worse, the decisions of social learners are more exaggerated than those of individual learners. Second, social learners react with a delay to changes in the environment. Third, the behavior of social learners becomes more and more detached from reality. We argue that our model gives insights into economic systems and markets.

What evolves in the evolution of social learning?

AbstractSocial learning is fundamental to social life across the animal kingdom, but we still know little about how natural selection has shaped social learning abilities on a proximate level. Sometimes, complex social learning phenomena can be entirely explained by Pavlovian processes that have little to do with the evolution of sociality. This implies that the ability to learn socially could be an exaptation, not an adaptation, to social life but not that social learning abilities have been left untouched by natural selection. I discuss new empirical evidence for associative learning in social information use, explain how natural selection might facilitate the associative learning process and discuss why such studies are changing the way that we think about social learning.

Imitation or innovation? Unselective mixed strategies can provide a better solution

Current theory about the evolution of social learning in a changing environment predicts the emergence of mixed strategies that rely on some selective combination of social and asocial learning. However, the results of a recent tournament of social learning strategies [Rendell et al. Science 328(5975):208-213, 2010] suggest that the success relies almost entirely on copying to learn behavior. Those authors conclude that mixed strategies are vulnerable to invasion by individuals using social learning strategies alone. Here we perform a competition using unselective strategies that differ only in the degree of social versus asocial learning. We show that, under the same conditions of the aforementioned tournament, a pure social learning strategy can be invaded by an unselectively mixed strategy and attain an equilibrium where the latter is majority. Although existing theory suggests that copying other individuals unselectively is not adaptive, we show that, at this equilibrium, the average individual fitness of the population is higher than for a population of pure asocial learners, overcoming Rogers' paradox in finite populations.

Different social-learning strategies in wild and domesticated zebrafish, Danio rerio

Social learning probably functions as a mechanism to acquire public information about food, predators and conspecifics, without paying the costs required for individual learning. Social learning should be strategic rather than indiscriminate, and although it is often suggested that animals should show conformity (‘copy the majority strategy’), there are surprisingly few tests of this idea. Our goals were to test experimentally whether social learning plays a role in boldness behaviour of wild and domesticated zebrafish, and to investigate whether they utilize similar social-learning strategies and conformity in their boldness behaviour. We tested whether timid wild-derived zebrafish become bolder, and more likely to approach a moving stimulus, after interacting socially with bolder domesticated fish (and vice versa). We found that wild zebrafish exposed to domesticated fish were bolder than controls, whereas domesticated fish exposed to the more timid, wild zebrafish did not differ in their boldness score compared to controls. The changes in the behaviour of wild fish persisted after the nonfocal groups were removed; however, we found no evidence for conformity. Our findings indicate that zebrafish use social learning for assessing risk and adapt their social-learning strategies to the costs of a perceived risk. Future studies should be able to utilize this model species to incorporate genetic and genomic tools to study the development and evolution of social learning.

Socially Influenced Behaviour and Learning in Locusts

AbstractAs a part of our research on the evolution of social learning in insects, we examined socially influenced behaviour and social learning in desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) nymphs and adults. In the nymphs, the only positive effect we documented was an increased tendency to feed while in the company of another locust than alone. The adults, on the other hand, showed significant preference for joining others (local enhancement) in both the contexts of feeding and egg laying. Neither nymphs nor adults, however, showed social learning. Our preliminary analyses pointed to locusts as a likely insect that might possess social learning. Our research, when taken together with research on phase‐shifts and swarm/marching behaviour of gregarious locusts, suggests that the behavioural dynamics of gregarious locusts may make local enhancement but not social learning beneficial. The possible difference we documented between the nymphs and adults could enable us to further explore the proximate and ultimate mechanisms that underlie socially influenced behaviour.

Evolution of social learning when high expected payoffs are associated with high risk of failure.

In an environment where the availability of resources sought by a forager varies greatly, individual foraging is likely to be associated with a high risk of failure. Foragers that learn where the best sources of food are located are likely to develop risk aversion, causing them to avoid the patches that are in fact the best; the result is sub-optimal behaviour. Yet, foragers living in a group may not only learn by themselves, but also by observing others. Using evolutionary agent-based computer simulations of a social foraging game, we show that in an environment where the most productive resources occur with the lowest probability, socially acquired information is strongly favoured over individual experience. While social learning is usually regarded as beneficial because it filters out maladaptive behaviours, the advantage of social learning in a risky environment stems from the fact that it allows risk aversion to be circumvented and the best food source to be revisited despite repeated failures. Our results demonstrate that the consequences of individual risk aversion may be better understood within a social context and suggest one possible explanation for the strong preference for social information over individual experience often observed in both humans and animals.

Locusts show rapid individual learning but no social learning about food

Socially influenced learning is important because it can drive the spread of novel behaviours among individuals within and between generations. While work on a few vertebrates suggests the conditions favouring the use of social over individual learning, we know little about the evolution of social learning. As a part of an ongoing examination of the evolutionary roots of social learning in insects, we tested for social learning in locusts, Locusta migratoria. Locusts showed rapid individual learning, preferring a diet they ate for a single meal of only 20 min over another diet of equal nutritional quality. Locusts, however, did not show stronger preference for novel food that they had previously consumed while in the presence of a conspecific experienced with that food. Furthermore, focal locusts did not learn about novel food from (1) experienced conspecifics that were observable through a screen, (2) interactions with conspecifics that had previously fed on and gave off odours from novel food and (3) cannibalizing conspecifics that had recently fed on novel food. Whereas our results extend previous work indicating excellent individual learning in locusts, they provide no evidence for socially influenced learning in a species that, in its gregarious form, has the opportunity for social learning and could benefit from such an ability.

The evolution of authoritarian processes: Fostering cooperation in large-scale groups.

Authoritarianism, comprising conventionalism, authoritarian submission, and authoritarian aggression, is an important factor underlying prejudice and social discrimination and therefore is typically perceived as socially problematic. In contrast, our work examines adaptive features of authoritarianism. Evolutionary game theoretical considerations (e.g., biased social learning) point to authoritarian psychological processes that establish and foster group life (e.g., high levels of ingroup cooperation). First, the evolution of social learning (particularly conformist and prestige biases) leads to the establishment of local and distinct cultural groups (conventionalism). Second, local cultural rules solve coordination dilemmas by transforming these rules into normative standards against which others are evaluated (authoritarian submission). Third, the common rules within a particular culture or group are reinforced by a tendency to reward norm compliance and punish norm deviations (authoritarian aggression). Implications regarding the deduction of novel research questions as well as dealing with authoritarianism as a social problem are discussed.

The evolution of conformist transmission in social learning when the environment changes periodically

Conformity is often observed in human social learning. Social learners preferentially imitate the majority or most common behavior in many situations, though the strength of conformity varies with the situation. Why has such a psychological tendency evolved? I investigate this problem by extending a standard model of social learning evolution with infinite environmental states (Feldman, M.W., Aoki, K., Kumm, J., 1996. Individual versus social learning: evolutionary analysis in a fluctuating environment. Anthropol. Sci. 104, 209–231) to include conformity bias. I mainly focus on the relationship between the strength of conformity bias that evolves and environmental stability, which is one of the most important factors in the evolution of social learning. Using the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) approach, I show that conformity always evolves when environmental stability and the cost of adopting a wrong behavior are small, though environmental stability and the cost of individual learning both negatively affect the strength of conformity.

Evolution of social learning does not explain the origin of human cumulative culture

Because culture requires transmission of information between individuals, thinking about the origin of culture has mainly focused on the genetic evolution of abilities for social learning. Current theory considers how social learning affects the adaptiveness of a single cultural trait, yet human culture consists of the accumulation of very many traits. Here we introduce a new modeling strategy that tracks the adaptive value of many cultural traits, showing that genetic evolution favors only limited social learning owing to the accumulation of maladaptive as well as adaptive culture. We further show that culture can be adaptive, and refined social learning can evolve, if individuals can identify and discard maladaptive culture. This suggests that the evolution of such “adaptive filtering” mechanisms may have been crucial for the birth of human culture.

Evolution of social learning: a mathematical analysis

Social learning is an important ability seen in a wide range of animals including humans. It has been argued that individual learning, social learning, and innate determination of behavior are favored by natural selection when environmental changes occur at short, intermediate, and long intervals, respectively. Only recently, however, has the hypothesis been examined by means of mathematical models. In this paper, we construct a simple model in which each organism uses one of three genetically determined strategies — it is an individual learner, a social learner or an “innate” — and the three types of organisms are in direct competition with each other. A reduced model, involving only the individual learners and innates, is effectively linear, and we show that by solving the eigenvalue problem of this reduced system we arrive at a good approximation to the global dynamics of the full model. We also study the effect of stochastic environmental changes and reversible mutations among the three strategies. Our results are consistent with the predictions of previous studies. In addition, we identify a critical level of environmental constancy below which only individual and social learners are present.

Culture and the evolution of social learning

Applications of modern evolutionary theory to human culture have generated several different theoretical approaches that challenge traditional anthropological perspectives. “Cultural selection” and “mind parasite” theories model culture as an independent evolutionary system because transmission of cultural traits via social learning is distinct from transmission of genes via DNA replication. “Dual-inheritance” and “co-evolution” theories model culture as an intermediary evolutionary process that involves information from two inheritance systems: genetics and social learning. “Evolutionary psychology” theories emphasize that the evolutionary history of natural selection on mental processes links culture and biological adaptation; hence, cultural information is viewed as part of the organic phenotype and not an independent evolutionary system. Cross-cultural universals and scenarios of the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” are used to identify characteristics of the “evolved mind” (human nature). “Behavioral ecology” theories examine relations between behavior and environmental context. Behavioral/cultural variations are viewed as products of flexible decision-making processes (evolved mind) that may respond adaptively to micro-environmental differences. It is difficult to devise empirical tests that distinguish among these theories, because they share many basic premises and make similar predictions about human behavior. Indeed, some of the apparent differences may be more semantic than substantive. Social learning is the key process underlying these evolutionary paradigms. Here I argue that human learning mechanisms are products of natural selection, and hence process information in ways that reflect evolutionary design. I review common objections to this hypothesis, including (1) learning processes are uncoupled from genetics and biological adaptation; (2) culture (or its effects) is partly extrasomatic; (3) culture, by most definitions, involves mental phenomena, including conscious thought; (4) culture involves the use of arbitrary symbols to communicate information; (5) culture appears to have emergent properties at the group level, such as shared values and beliefs resulting in political and religious institutions; (6) culture involves historical processes; and (7) complex culture is uniquely human—we need an explanation for why the human species alone evolved such extensive social learning aptitudes. I suggest that these controversies can be resolved, although empirical tests are difficult. I posit that social competition was a primary selective pressure on human mental abilities (Alexander 1989) and that this favored domain-general, constructivist learning capabilities (e.g., Quartz and Sejnowski, in press) that can manage context-dependent analysis and integrate information from domain-specific mechanisms (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994; MacDonald 1991; Sperber 1996). Humans are unique in the extraordinary levels of novelty that are generated by the processing of socially learned information. Human culture is cumulative; human cognition produces new ideas built upon the old. To a degree that far surpasses that of any other species, human mental processes must contend with a constantly changing information environment of their own creation. Cultural information may be especially dynamic because it is a fundamental aspect of human social competition. Apparently arbitrary changes in cultural traits, such as clothing styles, music, art, food, dialects, and so forth, may reflect information arms races among social competitors. The remarkable developmental plasticity and cross-domain integration of some cognitive mechanisms may be products of selection for special sensitivity to variable social context. Human “culture” is not just a pool or source of informational; it is an arena and theater of social manipulation and competition. Studies of human behavior—including language, kinship, mating relationships, subsistence, economics, and politics—generally are consistent with an evolutionary basis for social learning, but often they fail to add specific new knowledge about the mechanisms. Analyses of cognitive aptitudes underlying language, kinship, and so forth, often are inconclusive because cultural information (and consequent behavior) involves complex interaction among history, environmental variation, ontogenetic pathways of mental processes, and specific context. I suggest that empirical tests of evolutionary culture theory must build upon identification of apparent universals and examine individual variability by incorporating developmental psychology, environmental conditions, and social and historical context. This synthesis would benefit from enhanced cooperation between cognitive psychologist and cultural anthropologist.