Uniquely Human Aspects of Social Learning: The Role of Transmission Fidelity and Group Membership

In recent years, humanity's extraordinary social, ecological, and technological success has been increasingly attributed to the capacity for social learning in general and cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) in particular.This thesis consists of four chapters aimed at investigating the nature and origin of several uniquely human aspects of this ability.Chapter 1 consists of an extensive review of what forms social learning takes (section 1.1), how these processes give rise to culture (section 1.2), how culture evolves over time (section 1.3), and why cultural evolution becomes cumulative in some cases but not others (section 1.4).This review highlights similarities and differences between humans and other animals, with a special emphasis on complex forms of social learning, such as imitation and teaching, which are especially pronounced in humans.Chapter 2 examines why humans alone seem to have benefited so extensively from CCE.Because CCE probably depends far more heavily on how reliably information is preserved than on how efficiently it is refined, one possible reason that CCE appears diminished or absent in other species is that it requires accurate but specialized forms of social learning at which humans are uniquely adept.Using a Bayesian model, this chapter contrasts the evolution of high-fidelity social learning, which supports CCE, against low-fidelity social learning, which does not.This model reveals that high-fidelity transmission evolves under a considerably different set of conditions than less accurate social learning: It requires social and individual learning to be relatively inexpensive and abundant, cultural traits to be complex, and adaptive problems to be difficult.If these conditions are relatively difficult to meet, then this could explain why social learning is common, but CCE is rare.Chapter 3 explores whether social learning is affected by the unique ways in which humans form and delineate between social groups, namely by using arbitrary and symbolic group markers.Although previous studies have shown that people prefer to copy in-group members, these have failed to resolve whether group membership itself affects who is copied or whether membership merely correlates with other known factors, such as similarity and familiarity, which nonhuman animals also employ.This chapter presents a pair of experiments aimed at disentangling these explanations inquisitive nature has been an inspiration.I am also grateful to my committee members, Dr. Simon

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