The development of adaptive conformity in young children : effects of uncertainty and consensus

Human culture relies on extensive use of social transmission, which must be integrated with independently acquired (i.e. asocial) information for effective decision-making. Formal evolutionary theory predicts that natural selection should favor adaptive learning strategies, including a bias to copy when uncertain, and a bias to disproportionately copy the majority (known as conformist transmission'). Although the function and causation of these evolved strategies has been comparatively well studied, little is known of their development. We experimentally investigated the development of the bias to copy-when-uncertain and conformist transmission in children from the ages of 3 to 7, testing predictions derived from theoretical models. Children first attempted to solve a binary-choice quantity discrimination task themselves using asocial information, but were then given the decisions of informants, and an opportunity to revise their answer. We investigated whether children's revised judgments were adaptively contingent on (i) the difficulty of the trial and (ii) the degree of consensus amongst informants. As predicted, older but not younger children copied others more on more difficult trials than on easier trials, even though older children also showed a tendency to stick with their initial, asocial decision. We also found that older children, like adults, were disproportionately receptive to non-total majorities (i.e. were conformist) whereas younger children were receptive only to total (i.e. unanimous) majorities. We conclude that, whilst the mechanism for incorporating social information into decision-making is initially very blunt, across the course of early childhood it converges on the adaptive learning mechanisms observed in adults and predicted by cultural evolutionary theory. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://youtu.be/Qb6JINGYqVkPostprintPeer reviewe

Adaptive Trade-offs in the use of Social and Personal Information

In this chapter we review the redictions arising from theoretical models and outline the current empirical support for several social learning strategies, focusing largely on our own experimental studies and other recent work (Laland 2004; Kendal et al. 2005; Galef 2006). We draw attention to adaptive trade-offs in the use of social and personal information. Laland (2004) distinguished between two classes of social learning strategy, “when” strategies, which dictate the circumstances under which individuals copy others, and “who” strategies which specify from whom individuals learn. We address each in turn

The niche construction perspective: A critical appraisal

Niche construction refers to the activities of organisms that bring about changes in their environments, many of which are evolutionarily and ecologically consequential. Advocates of niche construction theory (NCT) believe that standard evolutionary theory fails to recognize the full importance of niche construction, and consequently propose a novel view of evolution, in which niche construction and its legacy over time (ecological inheritance) are described as evolutionary processes, equivalent in importance to natural selection. Here, we subject NCT to critical evaluation, in the form of a collaboration between one prominent advocate of NCT, and a team of skeptics. We discuss whether niche construction is an evolutionary process, whether NCT obscures or clarifies how natural selection leads to organismal adaptation, and whether niche construction and natural selection are of equivalent explanatory importance. We also consider whether the literature that promotes NCT overstates the significance of niche construction, whether it is internally coherent, and whether it accurately portrays standard evolutionary theory. Our disagreements reflect a wider dispute within evolutionary theory over whether the neo-Darwinian synthesis is in need of reformulation, as well as different usages of some key terms (e.g. evolutionary process)

Il barone rampante di Italo Calvino: una lettura “didattica”

Il barone rampante di Italo Calvino non è semplicemente una fiaba, ma un testo composito che si presta a varie interpretazioni e appare ricco di implicazioni di natura “formativa”. In questo intervento, pur facendo cenno a molte possibili chiavi di lettura dell’opera, se ne propone un approccio finalizzato alla discussione del problema della ribellione adolescenziale e giovanile, partendo dalla riflessione sul significato pedagogico che l’atto di ribellione di Cosimo può assumere. L’opera di Calvino infatti appare adatta ad affrontare, nel vivo del contesto scolastico ma in forma mediata, una delle questioni che si presentano costantemente quasi in ogni classe e in ogni livello di scuola, quella del rifiuto, da parte di uno o più allievi, dello studio, dell’istituzione scolastica, delle istituzioni in genere.Not a mere fable, Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees is a multifaceted text which may have various interpretations and many implications for its “formative” nature. While touching on the many possible readings of Calvino’s novel, this essay aims, above all, to highlight and discuss the issue of youth rebellion, as exemplified by an analysis of Cosimo’s act of rebellion and its pedagogical meaning. Thus, Calvino’s novel can be seen as an ideal medium for tackling one of the more common issues found in schools at almost every stage within the school system, that is, students’ refusal of schooling, educational systems and institutions

Some topics in theoretical population genetics: Editorial commentaries on a selection of Marc Feldman's TPB papers.

This article consists of commentaries on a selected group of papers of Marc Feldman published in Theoretical Population Biology from 1970 to the present. The papers describe a diverse set of population-genetic models, covering topics such as cultural evolution, social evolution, and the evolution of recombination. The commentaries highlight Marc Feldman's role in providing mathematically rigorous formulations to explore qualitative hypotheses, in many cases generating surprising conclusions

The Non-linear Dynamics of Meaning-Processing in Social Systems

Social order cannot be considered as a stable phenomenon because it contains an order of reproduced expectations. When the expectations operate upon one another, they generate a non-linear dynamics that processes meaning. Specific meaning can be stabilized, for example, in social institutions, but all meaning arises from a horizon of possible meanings. Using Luhmann's (1984) social systems theory and Rosen's (1985) theory of anticipatory systems, I submit equations for modeling the processing of meaning in inter-human communication. First, a self-referential system can use a model of itself for the anticipation. Under the condition of functional differentiation, the social system can be expected to entertain a set of models; each model can also contain a model of the other models. Two anticipatory mechanisms are then possible: one transversal between the models, and a longitudinal one providing the modeled systems with meaning from the perspective of hindsight. A system containing two anticipatory mechanisms can become hyper-incursive. Without making decisions, however, a hyper-incursive system would be overloaded with uncertainty. Under this pressure, informed decisions tend to replace the "natural preferences" of agents and an order of cultural expectations can increasingly be shaped

The biological bases of conformity

Humans are characterized by an extreme dependence on culturally transmitted information and recent formal theory predicts that natural selection should favor adaptive learning strategies that facilitate effective copying and decision making. One strategy that has attracted particular attention is conformist transmission, defined as the disproportionately likely adoption of the most common variant. Conformity has historically been emphasized as significant in the social psychology literature, and recently there have also been reports of conformist behavior in non-human animals. However, mathematical analyses differ in how important and widespread they expect conformity to be, and relevant experimental work is scarce, and generates findings that are both mutually contradictory and inconsistent with the predictions of the models. We review the relevant literature considering the causation, function, history, and ontogeny of conformity, and describe a computer-based experiment on human subjects that we carried out in order to resolve ambiguities. We found that only when many demonstrators were available and subjects were uncertain was subject behavior conformist. A further analysis found that the underlying response to social information alone was generally conformist. Thus, our data are consistent with a conformist use of social information, but as subjects' behavior is the result of both social and asocial influences, the resultant behavior may not be conformist. We end by relating these findings to an embryonic cognitive neuroscience literature that has recently begun to explore the neural bases of social learning. Here conformist transmission may be a particularly useful case study, not only because there are well-defined and tractable opportunities to characterize the biological underpinnings of this form of social learning, but also because early findings imply that humans may possess specific cognitive adaptations for effective social learning.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Social learning strategies and predation risk: minnows copy only when using private information would be costly

Animals can acquire information from the environment privately, by sampling it directly, or socially, through learning from others. Generally, private information is more accurate, but expensive to acquire, while social information is cheaper but less reliable. Accordingly, the ‘costly information hypothesis’ predicts that individuals will use private information when the costs associated with doing so are low, but that they should increasingly use social information as the costs of using private information rise. While consistent with considerable data, this theory has yet to be directly tested in a satisfactory manner. We tested this hypothesis by giving minnows (Phoxinus phoxinus) a choice between socially demonstrated and non-demonstrated prey patches under conditions of low, indirect and high simulated predation risk. Subjects had no experience (experiment 1) or prior private information that conflicted with the social information provided by the demonstrators (experiment 2). In both experiments, subjects spent more time in the demonstrated patch than in the non-demonstrated patch, and in experiment 1 made fewer switches between patches, when risk was high compared with when it was low. These findings are consistent with the predictions of the costly information hypothesis, and imply that minnows adopt a ‘copy-when-asocial-learning-is-costly’ learning strategy