Research on evolutionary bases of cultural competence

社会/文化学习是减少环境不确定性的有效方法，有助于个人采取适应性行为。虽然这对于学习暂时稳定的目标是显而易见的，例如获得避免有毒食物的技能，但在暂时不稳定的环境中，社会/文化学习的效用不太清楚，因为通过社会学习获得的知识可能已经过时。本研究从理论和实证两方面探讨了非平稳环境中社会/文化学习的适应价值。我们首先进行了一个进化的计算机模拟，扩展了Henrich和Boyd的[Evol.Hum.Behav.19（1998）215]。文化传播模式，取得以下成果。当个体对非平稳环境的学习成本很高时，种群中出现了一个混合均衡，其中从事昂贵的个体学习的成员和跳过信息搜索并搭其他成员搜索努力的成员以稳定的比例共存。这种“生产者-掠夺者”结构严重限制了社会/文化学习的有效性，特别是在使用社会信息时的“从众偏见”。然后，我们测试了这些命题的实验实施非平稳的不确定环境中的实验室。结果支持了我们的论点。

Social/cultural learning is an effective way to reduce uncertainty about the environment, helping individuals adopt an adaptive behavior cheaply. Although this is evident for learning about temporally stable targets, such as acquisition of a skill in avoiding toxic foods, the utility of social/cultural learning in a temporally unstable environment is less clear, since knowledge acquired by social learning may be outdated. This research addressed the adaptive value of social/cultural learning in a nonstationary environment both theoretically and empirically. We first conducted an evolutionary computer simulation that extended Henrich and Boyd's [Evol.Hum.Behav.19(1998)215.] model of cultural transmission, with the following results. When individual learning about the nonstationary environment is costly, a mixed equilibrium emerges in the population, where members who engage in costly individual learning and members who skip the information search and free-ride on other members' search efforts coexist at a stable ratio. Such a "producer-scrounger" structure qualifies effectiveness of social/cultural learning severely, especially "conformity bias" when using social information. We then tested these propositions by an experiment implementing a nonstationary uncertain environment in a laboratory. The results supported our thesis.