The ontogeny of selective social learning: Young children flexibly adopt majority- or payoff-based biases depending on task uncertainty

• Published in: Journal of experimental child psychology 2022-02, Vol.214, p.105307-105307, Article 105307
• Main Authors: Burdett, Emily R.R., Whiten, Andrew, McGuigan, Nicola
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bias; Child; Child, Preschool; Cultural learning; Humans; Learning; Majority bias; Payoff bias; Reward; Selective learning; Social Learning; Uncertainty
• ISSN: 0022-0965; 1096-0457
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105307

•Little work has examined how social learning biases interact with asocial learning.•Payoff and majority biases were manipulated using prior knowledge of reward values.•Children adopted a majority-biased strategy when the reward value was unknown.•When the reward value was known, children adopted a payoff-biased strategy.•Children use social and asocial information to maximize personal payoff. Humans have adapted well to diverse environments in part because of their ability to efficiently acquire information from their social environment. However, we still know very little as to how young children acquire cultural knowledge and in particular the circumstances under which children prioritize social learning over asocial learning. In this study, we asked whether children will selectively adopt either a majority-biased or payoff-biased social learning strategy in the presence or absence of asocial learning. The 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 117) were first shown a video in which four other children took turns in retrieving a capsule housing a reward from one of two boxes. Three of the children (the “majority”) retrieved a capsule from the same box, and a single individual (the “minority”) retrieved a capsule from the alternative box. Across four conditions, we manipulated both the value of the rewards available in each box (equal or unequal payoff) and whether children had knowledge of the payoff before making their own selection. Results show that children adopted a majority-biased learning strategy when they were unaware of the value of the rewards available but adopted a payoff-biased strategy when the payoff was known to be unequal. We conclude that children are strategic social learners who integrate both social and asocial learning to maximize personal gain.