Ladas Konstantinos, Kavadias Stylianos, Hutchison-Krupat Jeremy
University of Cambridge, Judge Business School, UK.
Evol Hum Sci. 2023 Oct 17;5:e32. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2023.24. eCollection 2023.
An essential feature of human progress is the use of different modes of learning so agents acquire the appropriate behaviour to survive in a changing environment. Learning may result from agents who discover new knowledge on their own (individual learning), or imitate the behaviour of others (social learning). Social learning is less costly than discovery, but imitation might yield no benefit. Early theoretical models of a population consisting of purely individual and purely social learners found that both types are present in an evolutionary equilibrium. However, the presence of social learners did not provide any improvement to the average population fitness. Subsequent research showed that the presence of social learners could improve the average population fitness, provided that the pure characterisation of the agents' learning is relaxed. We return to the pure conceptualisation of agents to challenge an assumption in the early work: agents were guaranteed enough resources to perform their desired learning. We show that, if the resources an agent receives are uncertain, this turns social learning into a source of fitness improvement at the population level. Perhaps counter-intuitively, uncertain provision of resources prompts an increase in the proportion of the population that pursues the costlier individual learning activity in equilibrium.
人类进步的一个基本特征是使用不同的学习方式，以便个体获得在不断变化的环境中生存所需的适当行为。学习可能源于个体自行发现新知识（个体学习），或模仿他人的行为（社会学习）。社会学习的成本低于发现新知识，但模仿可能没有益处。早期关于由纯粹的个体学习者和纯粹的社会学习者组成的群体的理论模型发现，这两种类型在进化平衡中都存在。然而，社会学习者的存在并没有提高群体的平均适应性。随后的研究表明，只要放宽对个体学习特征的纯粹定义，社会学习者的存在就可以提高群体的平均适应性。我们回到对个体的纯粹概念化，以挑战早期研究中的一个假设：个体被保证有足够的资源来进行他们想要的学习。我们表明，如果个体获得的资源是不确定的，这会使社会学习成为群体层面适应性提高的一个来源。也许与直觉相反，资源的不确定供应会促使在平衡状态下追求成本更高的个体学习活动的群体比例增加。
