Social learning -by observing and copying others- is a highly successful
cultural mechanism for adaptation, outperforming individual information
acquisition and experience. Here, we investigate social learning in the context
of the uniquely human capacity for reflective, analytical reasoning. A hallmark
of the human mind is our ability to engage analytical reasoning, and suppress
false associative intuitions. Through a set of lab-based network experiments,
we find that social learning fails to propagate this cognitive strategy. When
people make false intuitive conclusions, and are exposed to the analytic output
of their peers, they recognize and adopt this correct output. But they fail to
engage analytical reasoning in similar subsequent tasks. Thus, humans exhibit
an 'unreflective copying bias,' which limits their social learning to the
output, rather than the process, of their peers' reasoning -even when doing so
requires minimal effort and no technical skill. In contrast to much recent work
on observation-based social learning, which emphasizes the propagation of
successful behavior through copying, our findings identify a limit on the power
of social networks in situations that require analytical reasoning