Uncovering and mitigating the detrimental effects of social learning on the discovery of new solutions – OPTILEARN

The greatest accomplishments of our species result from a process known as cumulative culture. Computers, spaceships and scientific theories haven’t been invented by single, isolated individuals. Instead, they result from a collective process in which innovations are gradually added to existing cultural traits across many generations. Over time, the progressive incorporation of each generation’s own innovations results in the emergence of complex solutions that no individual could have invented on their own. Humans’ social learning abilities are pivotal to this process. Indeed, it is only when people learn from the achievements of other individuals that this form of collective learning can operate.

Yet, both historical evidence and a growing experimental literature suggest that social learning can sometimes constrain individuals’ exploration, promote the persistence of arbitrary solutions and hinder innovation. This suggests that social learning is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows the dissemination of useful solutions and potentiates subsequent improvements. On the other hand, it restricts learners’ exploration and decreases their probability of innovating.

The detrimental effect of social learning on individuals’ exploration began to be noticed only recently and the extent to which, and the conditions under which, it hinders innovation remain poorly understood. This project aims to improve our understanding of the extent to which social learning hinders innovation with the ultimate goal of assessing whether it is possible to reap the collective benefits of social learning (i.e., cumulative culture and collective intelligence) without paying the costs associated to it (i.e., fixation effects and limited exploration). To do so, the project will rely on the use of innovative experimental tasks that both can be solved with varying degrees of success and feature a discrete space of possibilities. This will enable team members to rigorously track the performance of individuals and meticulously investigate exploration both at the individual and group levels.

The project is organized along three interdependent lines of research. Sub-project 1 will provide a detailed account of the extent to which social learning restricts learners’ exploration. Sub-project 2 will evaluate whether the persistence of pre-existing solutions is mediated by the properties of the problems that people face. Finally, sub-project 3 will investigate whether group structure can be used to mitigate the detrimental effects of social learning on the discovery of new solutions.

The project’s results will provide important insights with both scientific and societal implications. Scientifically, it will promote our understanding of the conditions under which groups of individuals can get stuck with sub-optimal solutions and will bring quantitative data to the debate about the long-term persistence of arbitrary cultural solutions, a question that received a lot of attention from evolutionary anthropologists and behavioral ecologists. Societally, the results will have important implications for both educational practice (e.g. how to balance direct instruction and discovery learning) and innovation management (e.g. how to make individuals and groups more innovative).