Taylor-Davies Max, Bramley Neil, Lucas Christopher G
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Open Mind (Camb). 2025 May 9;9:677-708. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00205. eCollection 2025.
Social learning can be a powerful tool, allowing us to acquire knowledge and adaptive behaviours while bypassing many of the costs of learning through direct experience. However, not everyone's behaviour is equally valuable to learn from, as other people's goals or preferences may differ dramatically from our own. In this paper, we consider the problem of selectively learning from others on the basis of direct and indirect inferences about their task-relevant preferences. Specifically, we focus on the setting where a social learner must generalise preference judgements across individuals using shared features and other cues, and so develop a formal account that can reconcile a seemingly disparate empirical picture of group-based selective social learning. Across three behavioural experiments, we demonstrate that people are sensitive to the contextual significance of group identity cues when choosing who to learn from in partially observed environments. We show that this behaviour cannot be accounted for by a range of simpler heuristic strategies.
社会学习可以成为一种强大的工具，使我们能够获取知识和适应性行为，同时规避通过直接经验学习所带来的许多成本。然而，并非每个人的行为都同样值得学习，因为其他人的目标或偏好可能与我们自己的截然不同。在本文中，我们考虑基于对他人与任务相关偏好的直接和间接推断来有选择地向他人学习的问题。具体而言，我们关注这样一种情境，即社会学习者必须利用共享特征和其他线索对个体间的偏好判断进行归纳，从而构建一个形式化的解释，以调和基于群体的选择性社会学习这一看似迥异的实证图景。通过三项行为实验，我们证明，在部分可观察的环境中选择学习对象时，人们对群体身份线索的情境重要性很敏感。我们表明，一系列更简单的启发式策略无法解释这种行为。
