Impact of social dominance on the evolution of individual learning

Abstract

A major question in cultural-evolution studies is the phenotype of individual learners. Evidence suggests that social dominance is one influential factor, where socially subordinate individuals are more apt to learning of trial-and-error type than the dominants. Despite the accumulating evidence, the evolutionary dynamics leading to such outcomes remains largely elusive, partly because of the cost of individual learning. Here, we provide an evolutionary game framework to study the influence of social dominance on individual's learning decisions. We show that subordinates are indeed more apt to individual learning, because they gain a lot when individual learning is successful but lose little when it fails. We also predict that an evolutionary limit-cycle, in which dominants' and subordinates' behavior change over evolutionary time, may occur in such a case. We additionally showed that group-wide knowledge-gain is poor in egalitarian groups compared to moderately despotic ones. Our model sheds light onto the consequence of tactics played between dominants and subordinates for the evolution of individual learning.

Keywords: Cultural evolution; Individual learning; Social dominance.