BoundedRationality_TheAdaptiveToolbox.pdf

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Kevin N. Laland
A focus on social learning suggests a conception of human behavior that is
significantly frequency-dependent, and largely shaped by shared learned information,
in the form of ideas, beliefs, and values. The transmission and reception
of this information is constrained by naturally selected predispositions and past
learning. Similar views have been advocated by proponents of gene-culture
revolutionary theory (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Durham 1991; Feldman and
Laland 1996) and by economists who stress informational cascades
(Bikhchandani et al. 1998).
WHAT DOES SOCIAL LEARNING TELL US
ABOUT BOUNDED RATIONALITY?
Making "perfect" decisions about how to maximize reproductive success would
take considerable time, and have significant costs in terms of delay and computational
brain structures. Of course, animals do not have that luxury. They are required
to make rapid decisions that may have significant effects on fitness, and
that may sometimes even have life or death consequences, on the basis of inadequate
information. This in itself puts an upper ceiling on the level of rational behavior
we can expect from animals. In spite of this, animals consistently avoid
predators, find food, select mates, and reproduce effectively, often with extraordinary
efficiency. This is in part a tribute to the power of natural selection to
shape the behavior and decision-making processes of animals. However, for
many animals, adaptive behavior results in part from copying the behavior of
others. Social learning is usually a shortcut to adaptive behavior, by which animals
acquire valuable information about the environment by exploiting the
knowledge base of other members of the population, without having to explore,
invent, or investigate for themselves. Social learning provides animals with
cheap and dirty solutions to problems such as what to eat, how to process it,
where to find food, how to identify predators, how to choose mates, and much
more. "Do-what-others-do" is an effective heuristic in many situations, particularly
those in which both the observer and demonstrator of the target behavior
are exposed to equivalent environments, and those in which the observer is in a
position to assess the consequences to the target behavior. Animals probably do
not copy other animals indiscriminately, although this has yet to be established
empirically. Nonetheless, there is evidence that animals employ strategies such
as "Do-what-others-do" when they are uncertain, or, when there is no easier solution,
they use "Do-what-the-majority-do," or "Do-what-the-successfulindividuals-do."
Distinctions can be drawn between the capacity for social learning, behavior
that results from or is influenced by socially transmitted information, the transmitted
information, and socially maintained traditions. The capacity for social
learning is an adaptation that we can assume would not have been favored by
natural selection if it did not generate adaptive behavior most of the time.