What is said is more important than who says it: an experimental study of content and prestige biases in social learning
Date
2017
Authors
Berl, Richard E. W., author
Samarasinghe, Alarna N., author
Roberts, Sean G., author
Gavin, Michael C., author
Jordan, Fiona M., author
Gray, Russell D., author
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Abstract
Every human on our planet belongs to a culture, and we all begin to learn this information very early in life. But to accomplish this, we each have some very important decisions to make: What do we learn and who do we learn it from? And what do we do when these signals compete for our attention? To answer this, we used speakers of high and low prestige and two artificially constructed creation stories to test what information people use. Our findings may upturn our understanding of how humans learn and behave, and how our extraordinary capacity for culture evolved.
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Rights Access
Subject
cultural evolution
social learning
content bias
prestige bias
creation stories
cultural transmission
experimental