The social benefits of balancing creativity and imitation: Evidence from an agent-based model.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although creativity is encouraged in the abstract it is often discouraged in educational and workplace settings. Using an agent-based model of cultural evolution, we investigated the idea that tempering the novelty-generating effects of creativity with the novelty-preserving effects of imitation is beneficial for society. In Experiment One we systematically introduced individual differences in creativity, and observed a trade-off between the ratio of creators to imitators, and how creative the creators were. Excess creativity was detrimental because creators invested in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating proven ones. Experiment Two tested the hypothesis that society as a whole benefits if individuals adjust how creative they are in accordance with their creative success. When effective creators created more, and ineffective creators created less (social regulation), the agents segregated into creators and imitators, and the mean fitness of outputs was temporarily higher. We hypothesized that the temporary nature of the effect was due to a ceiling on output fitness. In Experiment Three we made the space of possible outputs open-ended by giving agents the capacity to chain simple outputs into arbitrarily complex ones such that fitter outputs were always possible. With the capacity for chained outputs, the effect of social regulation could indeed be maintained indefinitely. The results are discussed in light of empirical data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".