| Project/Area Number |
14310048
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
教育・社会系心理学
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| Research Institution | HOKKAIDO UNIVERSITY |
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Principal Investigator |
KAMEDA Tatsuya Hokkaido University, Grad.School of Letters, Prof., 大学院・文学研究科, 教授 (20214554)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
YUKI Masaki Hokkaido University, Grad.School of Letters, Asso.Prof., 大学院・文学研究科, 助教授 (50301859)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2002 – 2004
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| Project Status |
Completed (Fiscal Year 2004)
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| Budget Amount *help |
¥5,900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥5,900,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥3,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,200,000)
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| Keywords | Cultural learning / Adaptation / Evolutionary games / Evolutionarily stable equilibrium / Free-riders / 行動戦略 / 進化 / モデル / 実験 |
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| Research Abstract |
Social/cultural learning is an effective way to reduce uncertainty about the environment, helping individuals adopt an adaptive behavior cheaply. Although this is evident for learning about temporally stable targets, such as acquisition of a skill in avoiding toxic foods, the utility of social/cultural learning in a temporally unstable environment is less clear, since knowledge acquired by social learning may be outdated. This research addressed the adaptive value of social/cultural learning in a nonstationary environment both theoretically and empirically. We first conducted an evolutionary computer simulation that extended Henrich and Boyd's [Evol.Hum.Behav.19(1998)215.] model of cultural transmission, with the following results. When individual learning about the nonstationary environment is costly, a mixed equilibrium emerges in the population, where members who engage in costly individual learning and members who skip the information search and free-ride on other members' search efforts coexist at a stable ratio. Such a "producer-scrounger" structure qualifies effectiveness of social/cultural learning severely, especially "conformity bias" when using social information. We then tested these propositions by an experiment implementing a nonstationary uncertain environment in a laboratory. The results supported our thesis.
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