期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2015
卷号：112
期号：9
页码：2912-2917
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1417203112
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：SignificanceWe report on a two-step decision-making experiment. The first part shows that humans differ consistently in the way they learn from others. Some individuals are success-based learners, who try to identify successful peers and mimic their behavior. Others are frequency-based learners, who tend to adopt the most frequent behavior in their group. The second part reveals that these differences in social learning have important consequences for the outcome of social interactions. In situations where participants had to choose between a selfish option and an option benefitting their group, groups of frequency-based learners achieved considerably higher levels of cooperation than groups of success-based learners. This is the first clear experimental evidence that learning strategies are an important determinant of social behavior. It has often been argued that the spectacular cognitive capacities of humans are the result of selection for the ability to gather, process, and use information about other people. Recent studies show that humans strongly and consistently differ in what type of social information they are interested in. Although some individuals mainly attend to what the majority is doing (frequency-based learning), others focus on the success that their peers achieve with their behavior (success-based learning). Here, we show that such differences in social learning have important consequences for the outcome of social interactions. We report on a decision-making experiment in which individuals were first classified as frequency- and success-based learners and subsequently grouped according to their learning strategy. When confronted with a social dilemma situation, groups of frequency-based learners cooperated considerably more than groups of success-based learners. A detailed analysis of the decision-making process reveals that these differences in cooperation are a direct result of the differences in information use. Our results show that individual differences in social learning strategies are crucial for understanding social behavior.
