Reproductive skew affects social information use

Abstract

Individuals vary in their propensity to use social learning, the engine of cultural evolution, to acquire information about their environment. The causes of those differences, however, remain largely unclear. Individuals that experience high reproductive skew are expected to favour high-risk strategies, whereas those that experience low reproductive skew are expected to favour risk-averse strategies. Using an agent-based model, we tested the hypothesis that differences in energetic requirements for reproduction affect the value of social information. We found that social learning is associated with lower variance in yield and is more likely to evolve in risk-averse low-skew populations than in high-skew populations. Reproductive skew may also result in sex differences in social information use, as females tend to be more risk averse than males. To explore how risk may affect sex differences in learning strategies, we simulated learning in sexually reproducing populations. Where both sexes share the same environment they adopt more extreme learning strategies, approaching pure individual or social learning. These results provide insight into the conditions that promote individual and species level variation in social learning and so may affect cultural evolution.