Other Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Cultural Incubators And Spread Of Innovation, Enrico R. Crema, Mark W. Lake

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

Several forms of social learning rely on the direct or indirect evaluation of the fitness of cultural traits. Here we argue, via a simple agent-based model, that payoff uncertainty, that is the correlation between a trait and the signal used to evaluate its fitness, plays a pivotal role in the spread of beneficial innovation. More specifically, we examine how this correlation affects the evolutionary dynamics of different forms of social learning and how each can generate divergent historical trajectories depending on the size of the sample pool. In particular, we demonstrate that social learning by copying the best model is …