Why does individual learning endure when crowds are wiser?

TL;DR

This paper presents an evolutionary model explaining why individuals continue to seek personal information despite the efficiency of social learning, highlighting the roles of prestige, originality, and social dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model showing how individual learning persists alongside social learning due to social incentives and originality, under specific evolutionary conditions.

Findings

Both social and individual learning can coexist as stable strategies.

High success rates of informed agents and a moderate desire for popularity promote diversity.

Without these conditions, populations tend to converge to suboptimal equilibria.

Abstract

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 evolutionary-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.