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Trusting the experts: The domain-specificity of prestige-biased social learning
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Abstract:
This is the final version. Available on open access from the Public Library of Science via the DOI in this record ; Data Availability: The data underlying the results presented in the study are available from https://github.com/lottybrand/Prestige_2_Analysis ; Prestige-biased social learning (henceforth "prestige-bias") occurs when individuals predominantly choose to learn from a prestigious member of their group, i.e. someone who has gained attention, respect and admiration for their success in some domain. Prestige-bias is proposed as an adaptive social-learning strategy as it provides a short-cut to identifying successful group members, without having to assess each person's success individually. Previous work has documented prestige-bias and verified that it is used adaptively. However, the domain-specificity and generality of prestige-bias has not yet been explicitly addressed experimentally. By domain-specific prestige-bias we mean that individuals choose to learn from a prestigious model only within the domain of expertise in which the model acquired their prestige. By domain-general prestige-bias we mean that individuals choose to learn from prestigious models in general, regardless of the domain in which their prestige was earned. To distinguish between domain specific and domain general prestige we ran an online experiment (n = 397) in which participants could copy each other to score points on a general-knowledge quiz with varying topics (domains). Prestige in our task was an emergent property of participants' copying behaviour. We found participants overwhelmingly preferred domain-specific (same topic) prestige cues to domain-general (across topic) prestige cues. However, when only domain-general or cross-domain (different topic) cues were available, participants overwhelmingly favoured domain-general cues. Finally, when given the choice between cross-domain prestige cues and randomly generated Player IDs, participants favoured cross-domain prestige cues. These results suggest participants were sensitive to the source of prestige, and that they preferred domain-specific cues even though these cues were based on fewer samples (being calculated from one topic) than the domain-general cues (being calculated from all topics). We suggest that the extent to which people employ a domain-specific or domain-general prestige-bias may depend on their experience and understanding of the relationships between domains. ; Leverhulme Trust
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10871/126908
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0255346
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| 2 |
Understanding agriculture within the frameworks of cumulative cultural evolution, gene-culture co-evolution, and cultural niche construction
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Pursuing Darwin's curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.
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Mesoudi, A. - : National Academy of Sciences, 2017
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Cultural evolution: a review of theory, findings and controversies
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Experimental Studies of Cumulative Culture in Modern Humans: What Are the Requirements of the Ratchet?
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From cultural traditions to cumulative culture: parameterizing the differences between human and nonhuman culture.
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Variable cultural acquisition costs constrain cumulative cultural evolution
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