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. As highlighted in this review, 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 (i) when asocial learning would be costly, or (ii) when 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, when they are uncertain of the optimal behavior, when their personal information is unreliable, or when it has become outdated. We encourage theoreticians to incorporate social learning strategies into their models and empiricists to evaluate and test explicitly the assumptions and predictions of such models, even where they are already widely accepted. It is hoped that 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 (Danchin et al., 2004). 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. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.