Development of adaptive toolbox approach in social learning

关于社会学习的研究表明，人们使用多种策略。本研究采用了由Gigerenzer，T odd和ABC研究小组(1999)开发的自适应工具箱框架。其基本思想是，根据环境的不同，不同的策略比其他策略更具适应性，人们有选择地使用一种在给定情况下自适应的策略。在本研究中，我们重点研究了两种具有代表性的社会学习策略：多数策略和最佳成员策略。通过一系列的理论和实证研究，我们发现最好的成员往往比大多数成员表现得更好。然而，就像通常的情况一样，当很难确定真正的最佳成员时，多数成员策略的表现相对好于最佳成员策略。人们似乎只有在重新确定谁是真正的最佳成员时，才会从多数成员策略转向最佳成员策略。

Research on social learning revealed that people utilize multiple strategies. This research adopts theframework of adaptive toolbox developed by Gigerenzer , T odd & the ABC research group (1999)on this problem. The basic idea is that depending on the environments, different strategy becomesmore adaptive than the others and people selectively use a strategy that is adaptive in the givensituation. In this research, we focused on two representative social learning strategies; majoritystrategy and the best member strategy . Through a series of theoretical and empirical studies, wefound that the best member often outperforms the majority . However , as is often the case, when it isdifficult to identify the true best member , the majority strategy performs relatively better than thebest member strategy . People seem to switch from the majority to the best member strategy onlywhen a reliaermation indicating who the real best member is obtained.