The development of human social learning across seven societies

Abstract

Social information use is a pivotal characteristic of the human species. Avoiding the cost of individual exploration, social learning confers substantial fitness benefits under a wide variety of environmental conditions, especially when the process is governed by biases toward relative superiority (e.g., experts, the majority). Here, we examine the development of social information use in children aged 4-14 years (n = 605) across seven societies in a standardised social learning task. We measured two key aspects of social information use: general reliance on social information and majority preference. We show that the extent to which children rely on social information depends on children's cultural background. The extent of children's majority preference also varies cross-culturally, but in contrast to social information use, the ontogeny of majority preference follows a U-shaped trajectory across all societies. Our results demonstrate both cultural continuity and diversity in the realm of human social learning.

Fig. 1

The ontogeny of social learning in human children. Depicted are a children’s reliance on social information (vs. innovation), and b majority (vs. minority) preference, across cultures. Blue lines represent ontogenetic trajectories across cultures; shaded area around the blue lines represent 95% confidence intervals. Medians are represented by the bold, horizontal lines within the boxes. The boxes represent the interquartile range (IQR), the vertical lines attached to the boxes represent Q1–1.5 IQR (lower) and Q3 + 1.5 IQR (upper). Dot size in a is proportional to the number of observations in ratio 1:5, with minimum and maximum number of observations per dot being 1 and 33, respectively. Dot size in b is proportional to the number of observations in ratio 1:5, with minimum and maximum number of observations per dot being 1 and 24, respectively

Fig. 2

Culture-specific ontogenies of children’s social learning. Depicted are a children’s reliance on social information (vs. innovation), and b majority (vs. minority) preference, for each sampled culture. In a, n = 605, cultural diversity in social information use is represented by the differently valenced slopes across age (the slopes of Brazil and the Central African Republic in panel a almost perfectly overlap, see Supplementary Figure 1). In b, n = 475, cultural homogeneity in majority preference can be inferred from the similar U-shaped trajectories across age

Fig. 3

Experimental set-up. Illustration of the apparatus, including the a majority and b minority demonstrations. Upon dropping the ball into the pipe, a reward was automatically released from the apparatus