Journal article
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.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 688.9KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41467-018-04468-2
Authors
- Publisher:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Journal:
- Nature Communications More from this journal
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 1
- Pages:
- 2076
- Publication date:
- 2018-05-25
- Acceptance date:
- 2018-05-03
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2041-1723
- ISSN:
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2041-1723
- Pmid:
-
29802252
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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pubs:854571
- UUID:
-
uuid:b7081429-1f91-400e-bb37-a3fc887a3686
- Local pid:
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pubs:854571
- Source identifiers:
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854571
- Deposit date:
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2018-06-14
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Cohen et al
- Copyright date:
- 2018
- Notes:
- © The Author(s) 2018. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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