Excess individual creativity can be detrimental to society because creators
invest in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating proven ones. Moreover, a
proportion of individuals can benefit from creativity without being creative
themselves by copying creators. We hypothesized that (1) societies increase
their rate of cultural evolution by tempering the novelty-generating effects of
creativity with the novelty-preserving effects of imitation, and (2) this is
carried out by selectively rewarding and punishing creativity according to the
value of the individuals' creative outputs. We tested this using an agent-based
model of cultural evolution in which each agent self-regulated its
invention-to-imitation ratio as a function of the fitness of its cultural
outputs. In self-regulating societies, agents segregated into creators and
imitators. The mean fitness of cultural outputs was higher than in
non-self-regulating societies, and changes in diversity were rapider and more
pronounced. We discuss limitations and possible social implications of our
findings.Comment: 6 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1310.475
