Conservatism in laboratory microsocieties: unpredictable payoffs accentuate group-specific traditions
Conservatism in laboratory microsocieties: unpredictable payoffs accentuate group-specific traditions
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DOI：
10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2009.08.002
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发表时间：
2010-03-01
影响因子：
5.1
通讯作者：
Millen, Ailsa E.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Caldwell, Christine A.;Millen, Ailsa E.
理论工作预测，当个人学习成本高或有风险时，或者当个人学习行为的回报不确定时，个人应该战略性地增加对社会学习的依赖。使用一种已知的方法，在实验室中引起累积的文化进化，我们调查了组内相似性的程度，和组间的变化，在不同的不确定性的条件下，这些设计的可能有效性的参与者所作的设计选择。参与者被要求用意大利面和粘土建造一座塔，他们的目标是把塔建得尽可能高。在一种情况下，塔楼在完工后立即进行测量，因此，参与者能够在建筑过程中判断他们的设计是否成功。在另一种情况下，参与者的塔在完成后5分钟进行测量，然后故意尝试测试塔的稳定性，使参与者更难判断创新的解决方案是否容易在最终测量中获得好成绩。文化特性（即，设计可以被识别为属于特定链的程度）在延迟测量条件下更强，这表明参与者更加依赖社会学习。此外，在这种情况下，只有非常微弱的证据表明，连续改进的表现，在学习者的几代人，而在即时测量条件下，有一个明确的效果，稳步提高分数的目标测量。增加与自学相关的风险可能会促进武断传统的发展。(C)2010年爱思唯尔公司All rights reserved.
Theoretical work predicts that individuals should strategically increase their reliance on social learning when individual learning would be costly or risky, or when the payoffs for individually learned behaviors are uncertain. Using a method known to elicit cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory, we investigated the degree of within-group similarity, and between-group variation, in design choices made by participants under conditions of varying uncertainty about the likely effectiveness of those designs. Participants were required to build a tower from spaghetti and modeling clay, their goal being to build the tower as high as possible. In one condition, towers were measured immediately on completion and, therefore, participants were able to judge the success of their design during building. In the other condition, participants' towers were measured 5 min after completion, following a deliberate attempt to test the tower's stability, making it harder for participants to judge whether an innovative solution was liable to result in a good score on the Final measurement. Cultural peculiarity (i.e., the extent to which a design could be identified as belonging to a particular chain) was stronger in the delayed measure condition, indicating that participants were placing greater reliance on social learning. Furthermore, in this condition, there was only very weak evidence of successive improvement in performance over learner generations, whereas in the immediate measure condition there was a clear effect of steadily increasing scores on the goal measurement. Increasing the risk associated with learning for oneself may favor the development of arbitrary traditions. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.