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Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable

The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of why would anyone engage in individual information seeking, w...

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Autores principales: de Courson, Benoît, Fitouchi, Léo, Bouchaud, Jean-Philippe, Benzaquen, Michael
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8368188/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34400679
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-95914-7
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author de Courson, Benoît
Fitouchi, Léo
Bouchaud, Jean-Philippe
Benzaquen, Michael
author_facet de Courson, Benoît
Fitouchi, Léo
Bouchaud, Jean-Philippe
Benzaquen, Michael
author_sort de Courson, Benoît
collection PubMed
description The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of why would anyone engage in individual information seeking, which is a necessary condition for social learning’s efficacy. We propose an evolutionary model solving this paradox, provided agents (i) aim not only at information quality but also vie for audience and prestige, and (ii) do not only value accuracy but also reward originality—allowing them to alleviate herding effects. We find that under some conditions (large enough success rate of informed agents and intermediate taste for popularity), both social learning’s higher accuracy and the taste for original opinions are evolutionarily-stable, within a mutually beneficial division of labour-like equilibrium. When such conditions are not met, the system most often converges towards mutually detrimental equilibria.
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spelling pubmed-83681882021-08-17 Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable de Courson, Benoît Fitouchi, Léo Bouchaud, Jean-Philippe Benzaquen, Michael Sci Rep Article The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of why would anyone engage in individual information seeking, which is a necessary condition for social learning’s efficacy. We propose an evolutionary model solving this paradox, provided agents (i) aim not only at information quality but also vie for audience and prestige, and (ii) do not only value accuracy but also reward originality—allowing them to alleviate herding effects. We find that under some conditions (large enough success rate of informed agents and intermediate taste for popularity), both social learning’s higher accuracy and the taste for original opinions are evolutionarily-stable, within a mutually beneficial division of labour-like equilibrium. When such conditions are not met, the system most often converges towards mutually detrimental equilibria. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-08-16 /pmc/articles/PMC8368188/ /pubmed/34400679 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-95914-7 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
de Courson, Benoît
Fitouchi, Léo
Bouchaud, Jean-Philippe
Benzaquen, Michael
Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable
title Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable
title_full Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable
title_fullStr Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable
title_full_unstemmed Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable
title_short Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable
title_sort cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8368188/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34400679
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-95914-7
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