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Cited by 80Language and cultural evolutionChild and Animal Learning DevelopmentEvolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior

Social information use and social information waste

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Morin, Olivier, Jacquet, Pierre Olivier, Vaesen, Krist, Acerbi, Alberto·2021·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
DOI 10.1098/rstb.2020.0052PMC PMC8126467

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Abstract

Social information is immensely valuable. Yet we waste it. The information we get from observing other humans and from communicating with them is a cheap and reliable informational resource. It is considered the backbone of human cultural evolution. Theories and models focused on the evolution of social learning show the great adaptive benefits of evolving cognitive tools to process it. In spite of this, human adults in the experimental literature use social information quite inefficiently: they do not take it sufficiently into account. A comprehensive review of the literature on five experimental tasks documented 45 studies showing social information waste, and four studies showing social information being over-used. These studies cover ‘egocentric discounting’ phenomena as studied by social psychology, but also include experimental social learning studies. Social information waste means that human adults fail to give social information its optimal weight. Both proximal explanations and accounts derived from evolutionary theory leave crucial aspects of the phenomenon unaccounted for: egocentric discounting is a pervasive effect that no single unifying explanation fully captures. Cultural evolutionary theory's insistence on the power and benefits of social influence is to be balanced against this phenomenon. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution’.

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  • When some information is missing, decision-makers must rely on estimates, and humans tend to err in these estimates, often overestimating their chance of being correct, leading to ego bias.

    “Unfortunately, humans tend to err in these estimates, often overestimating their chance of being correct, leading to an implicit, unwarranted preference for their own opinions, an ego bias [52][53][54][55][56][57] .”

    From Enhancing human-AI collaboration: The case of colonoscopy (2024) · cites this paper as [55]

    Section 2 describes egocentric discounting as giving one’s own information more weight than warranted, and Section 3 says self-confidence predicts it. The paper does not establish that people generally overestimate their chance of being correct or that such overestimation causes the bias; it treats why people trust themselves more as an open question. No page number is available for these passages in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.86)

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Morin, O., Jacquet, P. O., Vaesen, K., & Acerbi, A.
Affiliations
  • Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
  • Inserm (FR)
  • Eindhoven University of Technology (NL)
  • Brunel University of London (GB)
Corresponding author
Acerbi, Alberto
ORCID
Venue
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
Publisher
The Royal Society
Published
2021-05-17
Volume
376
Issue
1828
Pages
20200052-20200052
ISSN
  • 0962-8436 (ISSN-L)
  • 1471-2970
DOI
10.1098/rstb.2020.0052
PMC
PMC8126467
OpenAlex
W3160337327
Cited by
80
References
7
Citations by year
2026: 19 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 1
FWCI
7.36
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • TU/e Research Portal (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • HAL (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • Institutional Research Information System (Università degli Studi di Trento) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • TU/e Research Portal (submittedVersion, other-oa)
Funders
ANR (ANR-17-EURE-0017 EUR, ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
Keywords
social information, social learning, cultural evolution, social influence, information use, evolutionary psychology
MeSH terms
Social Learning, Cultural Evolution, Humans, Psychology, Social, Information Dissemination

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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

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