Trade‐Offs in the Adaptive Use of Social and Asocial Learning

Theoretical models investigating the adaptive advantages of social learning conclude that social learning cannot be employed in a blanket or indiscriminate manner and that individuals should adopt flexible strategies that dictate the circumstances under which they copy others. This chapter outlines that the laboratory and captive-population based evidence is amassing, mostly with regard to foraging and mate choice, indicating that individuals preferentially rely on personally acquired information but acquire and use social or public information when asocial learning would be costly or asocial learning leaves them uncertain as to what to do. Individuals ignore social cues when they have relevant personal experience but rely on social learning when the costs of acquiring or implementing personal knowledge is high, they are uncertain of the optimal behavior, their personal information is unreliable, or it has become outdated. The consideration of the trade-offs inherent in the adaptive use of social and asocial learning will contribute to an increased understanding of the observed pattern of social learning processes and behavioral traditions in the animal kingdom, especially as the use of social information may lead to cultural evolution, which may in turn affect biological evolution. The hypothesis that individuals increasingly rely on social learning as the costs of asocial learning increase potentially explains the existence of maladaptive cultural traditions in humans and other animals. Furthermore, consideration of social learning strategies may explain why evidence for complex social learning processes appears to be related to ecological rather than taxonomic affinities among species