What do we learn from whom? an ingroup learning bias for the subjective and its implications for culture

• Main Author: Muthukrishna, Michael
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43011

Some types of cultural content flow between cultures, while others do not. Here I provide an answer to the question “what do we learn from whom?” and in doing so, identify a mechanism that may help explain this puzzle. Two experiments provide evidence for a proclivity to learn subjective content (e.g. opinions and beliefs) from ingroup members. No such learning bias was identified for objective content (e.g. facts), which were instead learnt from the larger population. In the second half of this thesis, I contrast the results of Dynamic Social Impact Theory models with results from more realistic social network models. The results indicate that features of more realistic human social networks affect the transmission of content in ways not captured by traditional Dynamic Social Impact Theory models. Instead, these latter models are at best a crude approximation of cultural transmission in physical space. I build on these models and explore the population level implications of the ingroup learning bias for subjective content identified in the two experiments. These models predict that the correlation between group membership and cultural content increases with greater levels of bias. Based on these results, we expect that subjective cultural content correlates more strongly with cultural identification than does objective cultural content.