title: Social learning in cooperative dilemmas.
abstract: Helping is a cornerstone of social organization and commonplace in human societies. A major challenge for the evolutionary sciences is to explain how cooperation is maintained in large populations with high levels of migration, conditions under which cooperators can be exploited by selfish individuals. Cultural group selection models posit that such large-scale cooperation evolves via selection acting on populations among which behavioural variation is maintained by the cultural transmission of cooperative norms. These models assume that individuals acquire cooperative strategies via social learning. This assumption remains empirically untested. Here, I test this by investigating whether individuals employ conformist or payoff-biased learning in public goods games conducted in 14 villages of a forager-horticulturist society, the Pahari Korwa of India. Individuals did not show a clear tendency to conform or to be payoff-biased and are highly variable in their use of social learning. This variation is partly explained by both individual and village characteristics. The tendency to conform decreases and to be payoff-biased increases as the value of the modal contribution increases. These findings suggest that the use of social learning in cooperative dilemmas is contingent on individuals' circumstances and environments, and question the existence of stably transmitted cultural norms of cooperation.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Ecology and Conservation, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, Penryn, Cornwall TR10 9FE, UK Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, UK s.lamba@exeter.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Shakti
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lamba
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005260:Female; D005717:Games, Experimental; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012919:Social Behavior; D012925:Social Conformity; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: conformity; cultural group selection; evolution of cooperation; norms; payoff-biased learning; public goods games