New research on cultural evolution indicates that conformism tends to hinder cooperation among individuals rather than enhance it.
The study, published July 10 in PLoS One, utilized game theory to examine how two learning strategies — conformism and payoff-based learning — affected cooperation over time.
“We have studied how different forms of social learning – ways to imitate one’s peers – can change the behaviour of individuals over time,” Lucas Molleman of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands told PsyPost via email. “The transmission of behaviour through teaching or imitation is an example of ‘cultural transmission’. This process can lead to a gradual change of the distribution of behaviours in a population. This process of ‘cultural evolution’ allowed humans to adapt to many different habitats across the world; much faster than genetic adaptation would have allowed us to. The course of cultural evolution depends on the ways in which behaviour transmits between individuals. Humans use various forms of social learning to determine their actions, and in our study focus on two of them: conformism (imitating the majority) and payoff-based learning (imitating successful others).”
“Specifically, we were interested in how these forms of learning affect individual’s inclination to cooperate with others in a group,” he added. “In their lives, humans are constantly confronted with social situations in which they can choose to cooperate, coordinate and divide labour with others in order to fulfill tasks that can never be successfully completed alone.”
The study was co-authored by Ido Pen and Franz J. Weissing of the University of Groningen.
The researchers used mathematical simulations to show how conformism and payoff-based learning proliferated within a population over time in various contexts. The mathematical simulations also showed the outcome of the proliferation of conformism and payoff-based learning. In the simulations, an individual had the inclination to either imitate successful individuals or imitate the majority of the population, but their inclination could change over time.
“In general, the role of conformism in cultural evolution is not so positive for human cooperation as it is generally viewed,” Molleman explained. “With a series of models, we show that conformism often makes social outcomes less efficient. On the one hand, conformism might help to achieve successful coordination on the same behaviour, such as driving on the left or the right side of the road. However, in many situations it can have dramatically bad consequences. For instance, when tasks have to be divided among group members, conformism tends to lead to a situation where all individuals behave in the same way, which can make the outcome less efficient at the group level.”
Psychologists and others studying behavior have frequently employed the Prisoner’s Dilemma game to investigate cooperation. In the game, two players are given the option to defect against their partner or cooperate with them. If they both cooperate, each partner receives a modest reward. However, if only one partner cooperates, then the defecting participant receives a large reward, while the cooperating person receives nothing. If both partners defect, they each receive a small award.
If a partner hopes to maximize his or her rewards, then that partner should defect. But if both partners follow this strategy, they will end up with less than if they cooperated, hence the dilemma.
In the Prisoner’s Dilemma and other social dilemma games,
“In the context of social dilemma’s (such as the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma), an influential theory holds that conformism was key to the evolution of human cooperation,” Molleman told PsyPost. “When individuals use payoff-based learning, cooperation is doomed since defectors obtain higher payoffs. The idea is that conformism can help groups of cooperators deter defectors, since these defectors start cooperating due to punishment or due to their inclination to conform to the local majority. Advocates of this theory argue that due to competition between groups (‘group selection’), cooperation can spread throughout a population since cooperative groups beat groups of defectors. Our models show that conformism tends to hinder rather than facilitate the cultural evolution of cooperation since cooperative individuals arriving in a group of defectors will cease to cooperate due a double disadvantage: they get lower payoffs (so that they are disfavoured by payoff-based learning) and they are in the minority (so that they are disfavoured by conformism).”
Mathematical simulations provide valuable insights into how social strategies can evolve and interact in a population over time. Game theory has been used by biologists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists to investigate conflict and cooperation among individuals. However, like any form of research, simulations can only tell us so much.
“As some caveats, I can say that one important assumption in our models (and most models of cultural evolution that study the spread of behavioural traits) is that all individuals in the population use the same social learning rules,” Molleman said. “As all psychologists know, people greatly differ in all kinds of personality traits, and it is likely that people will also differ in how they learn from others. It is an important outstanding question of what the consequences of such individual variation in learning strategies are for cultural evolution.”
“Of course, all such models should be backed up by empirical evidence; how people in reality learn from others is far from clear – and this might also depend on the kind of social situation they find themselves in. Psychologists, economists, sociologists and biologists are now working hard to understand these kind of issues. I believe that the coming years would bring us a lot of new insights in the empirics of social learning. More sophisticated models can then use these insights to get a deeper understanding of cultural evolution.”
