van den Berg Pieter, Molleman Lucas, Weissing Franz J
Theoretical Biology Group, University of Groningen, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands; and.
Theoretical Biology Group, University of Groningen, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands; and The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Mar 3;112(9):2912-7. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1417203112. Epub 2015 Feb 17.
It has often been argued that the spectacular cognitive capacities of humans are the result of selection for the ability to gather, process, and use information about other people. Recent studies show that humans strongly and consistently differ in what type of social information they are interested in. Although some individuals mainly attend to what the majority is doing (frequency-based learning), others focus on the success that their peers achieve with their behavior (success-based learning). Here, we show that such differences in social learning have important consequences for the outcome of social interactions. We report on a decision-making experiment in which individuals were first classified as frequency- and success-based learners and subsequently grouped according to their learning strategy. When confronted with a social dilemma situation, groups of frequency-based learners cooperated considerably more than groups of success-based learners. A detailed analysis of the decision-making process reveals that these differences in cooperation are a direct result of the differences in information use. Our results show that individual differences in social learning strategies are crucial for understanding social behavior.
人们常常认为，人类卓越的认知能力是对收集、处理和利用他人信息能力进行选择的结果。最近的研究表明，人类在对何种类型的社会信息感兴趣方面存在显著且持续的差异。尽管一些人主要关注大多数人在做什么（基于频率的学习），但另一些人则关注同伴行为所取得的成功（基于成功的学习）。在此，我们表明社会学习中的此类差异对社会互动的结果具有重要影响。我们报告了一项决策实验，在该实验中，个体首先被分类为基于频率和基于成功的学习者，随后根据他们的学习策略进行分组。当面对社会困境时，基于频率的学习者群体比基于成功的学习者群体合作得更多。对决策过程的详细分析表明，合作中的这些差异是信息使用差异的直接结果。我们的结果表明，社会学习策略中的个体差异对于理解社会行为至关重要。
