The evolution of similarity-biased social learning.

ABSTRACT: Humans often learn preferentially from ingroup members who share a social identity affiliation, while ignoring or rejecting information when it comes from someone perceived to be from an outgroup. This sort of bias has well-known negative consequences - exacerbating cultural divides, polarization, and conflict - while reducing the information available to learners. Why does it persist? Using evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that similarity-biased social learning (also called parochial social learning) is adaptive when (1) individual learning is error-prone and (2) sufficient diversity inhibits the efficacy of social learning that ignores identity signals, as long as (3) those signals are sufficiently reliable indicators of adaptive behaviour. We further show that our results are ro

SUBMITTER: Smaldino PE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11859121 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature