Läser just nu The secret of our success (Henrich) och Humankind (Bregman). En tes i båda är att det är viktigare (för både individer och populationer) att kunna lära sig av andra (s k socialt lärande, att härma det som visat sig fungera bättre) än att själv vara smart/individuell smarthet.
Intressant nog tycks graden av socialt lärande variera mellan samhällen/kulturer. I Henrichs bok fann jag en referens till detta papper, vari i följande kan läsas:
While initially social learning was seen as informationally ‘parasitic’ [4], with social learners ‘scrounging’ information produced at some cost by asocial learners, recent models have revealed a range of conditions under which social learning can theoretically enhance the fitness of both individuals and populations [5–10]. [...]
several lines of circumstantial evidence suggest that human social learning is cross-culturally variable, with people in the West less likely to copy others than people from East Asia [24]. [...]
we provide the first direct cross-cultural East–West comparison of the adaptiveness of human social learning, with no participant-deception and with a challenging task with no intuitively obvious solution. [...] All participants completed a computer-based task to design a virtual arrowhead which is then used on a series of hunting trip [...] After participants have chosen whether to modify their arrowhead or not via asocial or social learning, they click a HUNT button to see how many calories their arrowhead yields out of 1000. [...]
Participants [sammanfattat, ej citerat]: Seventy-six British participants, 70 recent Chinese immigrants to the UK, The Hong Kong sample comprised 73 participants, The Chinese mainland sample comprised 73 participants from Chao Zhou Normal University in Chao Zhou, a relatively small city of 2.6 million inhabitants in the same province (Guangdong) as Hong Kong
Resultaten är tydliga: Kineser och kvinnor är mer benägna till social lärande. Den kulturella effekten är betydligt större än könseffekten. Ur pappret:
Despite their Chinese heritage, HK and CI participants were comparable to UK participants in their copying frequencies. We suggest that CI and HK participants have recently undergone a shift from Eastern ‘high social learning’ to Western ‘high asocial learning’ due to the increasing Westernization of China. Ur pappret:
The effect of sex was roughly half that of culture (table 1). The odds of a female participant copying in Season 1 was e0.36 = 1.43 (95% CI[1.01, 2.01]) times that of a male participant, and in Season 2 was e0.34 = 1.40 (95% CI[0.96, 2.06]) times that of a male participant. [...]
Intressant nog betedde sig Kinesiska migranter i UK inte som Kineserna i Kina, vilket får författarna att fundera:
Despite their Chinese heritage, HK and CI participants were comparable to UK participants in their copying frequencies. We suggest that CI and HK participants have recently undergone a shift from Eastern ‘high social learning’ to Western ‘high asocial learning’ due to the increasing Westernization of China
Min fundering: På populationsnivå torde det finnas en kontextberoende optimal mix av socialt och asocialt lärande. Det är alltså inte självklart att högre socialt lärande alltid är att föredra. Men poängen som jag tror att både Henrich och i viss utsträckning även Bregman vill göra är att om det bara finns några enstaka 'asociala smartingar' är det socialt lärande som gör susen på populationsnivå.
Källa: Mesoudi, Alex, Lei Chang, Keelin Murray, and Hui Jing Lu. 2014. "Higher Frequency of Social Learning in China than in the West Shows Cultural Variation in the Dynamics of Cultural Evolution." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 282(1798). /pmc/articles/PMC4262178/?report=abstract (July 30, 2020).
