Atkisson Curtis, O'Brien Michael J, Mesoudi Alex
Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA.
Evol Psychol. 2012 Aug 13;10(3):519-37. doi: 10.1177/147470491201000309.
Social learning (learning from others) is evolutionarily adaptive under a wide range of conditions and is a long-standing area of interest across the social and biological sciences. One social-learning mechanism derived from cultural evolutionary theory is prestige bias, which allows a learner in a novel environment to quickly and inexpensively gather information as to the potentially best teachers, thus maximizing his or her chances of acquiring adaptive behavior. Learners provide deference to high-status individuals in order to ingratiate themselves with, and gain extended exposure to, that individual. We examined prestige-biased social transmission in a laboratory experiment in which participants designed arrowheads and attempted to maximize hunting success, measured in caloric return. Our main findings are that (1) participants preferentially learned from prestigious models (defined as those models at whom others spent longer times looking), and (2) prestige information and success-related information were used to the same degree, even though the former was less useful in this experiment than the latter. We also found that (3) participants were most likely to use social learning over individual (asocial) learning when they were performing poorly, in line with previous experiments, and (4) prestige information was not used more often following environmental shifts, contrary to predictions. These results support previous discussions of the key role that prestige-biased transmission plays in social learning.
社会学习（向他人学习）在广泛的条件下具有进化适应性，并且是社会科学和生物科学中长期以来备受关注的领域。文化进化理论衍生出的一种社会学习机制是威望偏见，它使处于新环境中的学习者能够快速且低成本地收集有关潜在最佳教师的信息，从而最大程度地增加其习得适应性行为的机会。学习者会尊重地位高的个体，以便讨好该个体并获得更多接触机会。我们在一项实验室实验中研究了威望偏见型社会传播，在该实验中，参与者设计箭头并试图使狩猎成功率最大化，狩猎成功率以热量回报来衡量。我们的主要发现是：（1）参与者优先向有声望的模型学习（定义为其他人注视时间更长的那些模型）；（2）威望信息和与成功相关的信息被同等程度地使用，尽管在本实验中前者不如后者有用；（3）与之前的实验一致，当参与者表现不佳时，他们最有可能通过社会学习而非个体（非社会）学习；（4）与预测相反，在环境变化后，威望信息并未被更频繁地使用。这些结果支持了先前关于威望偏见传播在社会学习中所起关键作用的讨论。
