Learning, productivity, and noise: an experimental study of cultural transmission on the Bolivian Altiplano
Learning, productivity, and noise: an experimental study of cultural transmission on the Bolivian Altiplano
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DOI：
10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2006.05.005
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发表时间：
2007-01-01
影响因子：
5.1
通讯作者：
Baum, William
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Efferson, Charles;Richerson, Peter J.;Baum, William
文化传播理论区分了有偏见和无偏见的社会学习。偏见仅仅意味着社会学习不是完全随机的。这种区别是至关重要的，因为偏见在总体水平上产生影响，然后反馈到影响个人行为。这项研究提出了一个专门设计的经济实验，看看玩家是否以有偏见的方式使用社会信息。这项实验是在玻利维亚南部的一群自给牧民中进行的。研究人员设计了两种被广泛讨论的有偏见的社会学习形式：模仿成功的倾向和跟随大多数人的倾向。这项分析主要基于使用最大似然法将特定的进化模型与数据拟合，既没有发现模仿成功的明显趋势，也没有发现从众。相反，参与者似乎主要依赖于关于他们个人选择和收益历史的私人反馈。尽管如此，在一个治疗的性能改善提供了一些重要的，但目前未明确的社会影响的证据。鉴于现有的实验工作从其他社会的文化传播，目前的研究表明，社会学习是潜在的条件和文化特定的。(c)2007年爱思唯尔公司All rights reserved.
The theory of cultural transmission distinguishes between biased and unbiased social learning. Biases simply mean that social learning is not completely random. The distinction is critical because biases produce effects at the aggregate level that then feed back to influence individual behavior. This study presents an economic experiment designed specifically to see if players use social information in a biased way. The experiment was conducted among a group of subsistence pastoralists in southern Bolivia. Treatments were designed to test for two widely discussed forms of biased social leaming: a tendency to imitate success and a tendency to follow the majority. The analysis, based primarily on fitting specific evolutionary models to the data using maximum likelihood, found neither a clear tendency to imitate success nor conformity. Players instead seemed to rely largely on private feedback about their own personal histories of choices and payoffs. Nonetheless, improved performance in one treatment provides evidence for some important but currently unspecified social effect. Given existing experimental work on cultural transmission from other societies, the current study suggests that social leaming is potentially conditional and culturally specific. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.