Evolution and Human Behavior 24 (2003) 242 – 260

Does social/cultural learning increase human adaptability?
Rogers’s question revisited
Tatsuya Kameda*, Daisuke Nakanishi
Department of Behavioral Science, Hokkaido University, Bungakubu N10 W7,
Kita-ku, Sapporo 060-0810, Japan
Received 9 January 2003; received in revised form 24 March 2003

Abstract
It is often taken for granted that social/cultural learning increases human adaptability, because it
allows us to acquire useful information without costly individual learning by trial and error. Rogers[Am. Anthropol. 90 (1988) 819] challenged this common view by a simple analytic model.
Assuming a ‘‘cultural’’ population composed of individual learners engaging in costly information
search and imitators who just copy another member’s behavior, Rogers showed that mean fitnessof such a mixed ‘‘cultural’’ population at the evolutionary equilibrium is exactly identical to themean fitness of an ‘‘acultural’’ population consisting only of individual learners. Rogers’s result
implies that no special adaptive advantage accrues from social/cultural learning. We revisited thiscounterintuitive argument through use of an experiment with human subjects, and by a series of
evolutionary computer simulations that extended Kameda and Nakanishi [Evol. Hum. Behav. 23(2002) 373]. The simulation results indicated that, if agents can switch between individual learningand imitation selectively, a ‘‘cultural’’ population indeed outperforms an ‘‘acultural’’ population inmean fitness for a broad range of parameters. An experiment that implemented a nonstationary
uncertain environment in a laboratory setting provided empirical support for this thesis.
Implications of these findings for cultural capacities and some future directions are discussed.
D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Social learning; Cultural transmission; Cultural capacities; Nonstationary uncertain environment; Mean
fitness; Producer – scrounger dilemma* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: tkameda@let.hokudai.ac.jp (T. Kameda).
1090-5138/03/$ – see front matter D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S1090-5138(03)00015-1

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1. Introduction
Social/cultural learning is fairly common in the animal kingdom at least in its elementaryform. Accumulating evidence suggests that acquisition of food preferences, selection of
foraging or nest sites, vocal and motor patterns, etc. are influenced by ‘‘cultural’’transmission in some group-living species, including humans (e.g., Galef & Whiskin,2001; Giraldeau & Caraco, 2000; Heyes & Galef, 1996; Laland, Odling-Smee, & Feldman,
2000; Rendall & Whitehead, 2001). One major adaptive advantage usually ascribed to such
cultural learning is its uncertainty-reduction function: Cultural learning allows us to acquire
adaptive behaviors in an uncertain environment cheaply without costly individual learningby trial and error (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Hernich & Boyd, 1998). However, as
discussed below, the temporally fluctuating nature of adaptive environments, which isconsidered to be a core element of the human environment of evolutionary adaptedness(EEA; cf. Potts, 1996; Richerson & Boyd, 2000), poses a theoretical challenge to this view
(Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002). Indeed, Rogers (1988) presented a theoretical model
implying that cultural transmission may have no adaptive advantage in a temporally
unstable environment. In this paper, through the use of an experiment with human subjects
and by a series of evolutionary computer simulations, we revisit Rogers’s question,
examining the presumed uncertainty-reduction function of cultural transmission in a
nonstationary uncertain environment.
1.1. Uncertainty reduction by social/cultural learning
To illustrate the uncertainty-reduction function of social/cultural learning, let us start withthe ‘‘mushroom foraging problem’’ that we used before (Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002).
Suppose that you have found a clump of mushrooms in a forest, but you are uncertain if they
are edible. Individual learning by trial and error may be fatal in this case, so a cheap andreliable way to cope with this uncertainty is to ask experts’ or elders’ opinions, or simply
observe their behaviors, especially if you refer to more than one ‘‘cultural parent’’ and follow
their common view (‘‘conformist transmission’’; Boyd & Richerson, 1985). Indeed, theprevious literature suggests that acquisition of food preferences among humans is heavily
influenced by cultural transmission (Katz & Schall, 1979; Rozin, 1989; see also Galef &Whiskin, 2001 for social acquisition of food preferences in rats).
Yet, the mushroom example may illuminate limitations of cultural learning as well. Noticethat culturally transmitted knowledge about the mushrooms holds true across generations: If
someone in your tribe died from a mushroom centuries ago, the incident still conveys
valuable information to the current generation. Social/cultural learning about such atemporally stable target should therefore function as a highly effective mechanism to reduce
uncertainty, but a far more challenging case is provided by a temporally unstable environment
where a behavior that was adaptive in previous generations may no longer be so (Henrich &Boyd, 1998). This sort of environmental instability was quite common in our evolutionary
history; for example, recent studies on ice cores and ocean sediments suggest that the
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time scales (cf. Potts 1996; Richerson & Boyd, 2000). Is social/cultural learning still adaptive
in such a temporally unstable environment?
1.2. Provision of updated information about the adaptive environment
1.2.1. Free-rider problem
Usefulness of social/cultural learning depends on the overall quality of the ‘‘cultural
knowledge pool,’’ which is sustained by the fact that group members provide adaptively
appropriate information about the environment. In the mushroom example, the issue of
information provision is relatively marginal; given its stable nature, one tragic accident in thepast should, in principle, be sufficient. However, in a temporally fluctuating environment
where updates of the cultural knowledge pool are frequently needed, we may have a totallydifferent picture.
Kameda and Nakanishi (2002) argued that the free-rider problem about information
provision is essential for understanding cultural groups. In many actual situations,individual learning by trial and error is costlier than social learning in energy, time, orrisk. The extra cost required for individual learning must be borne by the individual solely,
whereas the acquired information potentially benefits everyone via the cultural knowledge
pool. The cultural knowledge pool is similar to public goods in some respects, and thus afree-rider problem (Hardin, 1968) complicates the issue of information provision in a
temporally fluctuating environment. More specifically, Kameda and Nakanishi argued that
this situation constitutes a producer–scrounger dilemma like that found among social
foragers (cf. Barnard & Sibly, 1981; Giraldeau & Caraco, 2000; Krebs & Inman, 1992;
Vickery, Giraldeau, Templeton, Kramer, & Chapman, 1991): The asymmetry in learning
cost creates the possibility that if many others engage in costly individual learning, it may
be better for some to skip the individual information search completely and ‘‘free-ride’’ onothers’ efforts. However, if too many others just rely on social information, it may bebetter to engage in individual learning. Theoretically, this situation should yield a mixed
Nash equilibrium in the cultural population, where information producers who engage
in costly individual information search and information scroungers who skip thesearch coexist at a stable ratio. Kameda and Nakanishi formalized these ideas by aseries of evolutionary computer simulations and confirmed them by an experiment withhuman subjects.
1.2.2. Rogers’s question
These results imply that, because of the free-rider problem, the overall quality of a cultural
knowledge pool that underlies the presumed adaptive advantage of social learning may notnecessarily be guaranteed in a nonstationary environment. Rogers (1988) illustrated thispossibility clearly, using a simple but appealing model. The model assumes a population of
hypothetical organisms living in a temporally fluctuating environment that can change
between two states, A and B, with a small probability in any two consecutive generations.
Behavior A is more fit if the environment is in State A, whereas Behavior B is more fit inState B. Rogers assumed two genotypes in the population — individual learners and imitators.

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Individual learners engage in costly information search, whereas imitators save this cost by
picking a random individual from the population and copying its behavior. Fig. 1 illustrates
the model’s implication for the fitness of individual learners and imitators, as a function of thefrequency of imitators in the population (cf. Boyd & Richerson, 1995).
As shown in the figure, the fitness of individual learners is constant regardless of thefrequency of imitators in the population, because they are not affected by cultural
information. However, the fitness of imitators depends on their prevalence: When imitators
are rare, the quality of the cultural knowledge pool is still high, allowing them to enjoy thebenefit of culture without bearing the individual-learning cost, and imitators are therefore
more fit than individual learners. If there are too many imitators, however, the flow of valid
knowledge into the knowledge pool degrades, and imitators risk imitating other imitators
making them less fit than individual learners. As discussed by Kameda and Nakanishi (2002),
the situation leads to a mixed equilibrium eventually, where individual learners and imitators
coexist at a stable ratio in the population.
Now, consider another population composed only of individual learners. Different from themixed ‘‘cultural population’’ above, all agents in this population engage in individual
information search and are unaffected by social/cultural information at all. Then, what about
the mean fitness of this ‘‘acultural population’’ compared to the cultural population? Does thedeprivation of social learning ability reduce mean fitness of the acultural population?
Surprisingly, the answer is no. Because the fitness of individual learners is constant(see Fig. 1), it logically follows that the acultural population has exactly the same fitness(see the point marked Y in the figure) as the mixed cultural population (see the point marked X).
In other words, contrary to intuition, the Rogers model implies that social/cultural learning does
not increase mean fitness of the population at all.
Boyd and Richerson (1995) examined this ‘‘paradox’’ in detail, and they concluded that
the Rogers thesis is logically correct as long as the only benefit of social/cultural learning is

Fig. 1. Cultural learning provides no fitness advantage to the population in Rogers’s (1988) model. When
individual learners and imitators (cultural learners) are at equilibrium in a mixed population, their average fitness
is the same as that of individual learners in a population without imitators.

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cost-saving for imitators. In the following, we revisit Rogers’s question first empirically by anexperiment with human subjects, and then theoretically through a series of evolutionary
computer simulations. By linking an experiment to a theoretical model in an integrated
manner, this paper explores conditions under which social/cultural learning may increasehuman adaptability via its uncertainty-reduction function.

2. Experiment2.1. Overview
Kameda and Nakanishi (2002) empirically demonstrated that, in a cultural population,
information producers who engage in costly information search and information scroungers,
who save the search cost, coexisted at a stable ratio as a result of individual-level fitness
maximization. The Rogers model implies that this ‘‘cultural’’ equilibrium is not Paretoefficient, compared to the ‘‘acultural’’ equilibrium; group-level fitness (mean fitness) is thesame in the two populations. This feature was not tested by Kameda and Nakanishi. Thus, inthe present experiment, we address Rogers’s question directly in a laboratory setting thatsimulates a temporally fluctuating environment. In accord with the Rogers framework, wecreated two experimental ‘‘populations,’’ cultural or acultural, in the laboratory. In the cultural
population, participants could refer to other participants’ past behaviors when deciding theirown behaviors in the current environment, whereas such social referencing was not possible
in the acultural population. Opportunity for individual learning about the current environment
was equally available in both populations. We then compared mean ‘‘fitness’’ of the two
experimental populations to examine the Rogers thesis.
2.2. Method
2.2.1. ParticipantsParticipants were 162 (98 male and 64 female) undergraduate students enrolled in
introductory psychology classes at Hokkaido University, Japan.
2.2.2. Experimental task
The experimental task was identical to that used by Kameda and Nakanishi (2002), whodeveloped a computer game called ‘‘Where is the rabbit?’’ that simulated a fluctuating
uncertain environment in a laboratory setting. In this game, participants judged in which of
two nests a rabbit was currently located based on stochastic information. Participants played
the game for a total of 60 rounds. They were instructed that the rabbit (environment) had atendency to stay in the same nest over time, but this tendency was not perfect; the rabbit
might change its location between any two consecutive rounds with a small probability. Thus,
the location of the rabbit in a given round corresponds to the current state of the fluctuating
environment. All participants experienced the same randomly determined fluctuation patternwhere the rabbit moved on 20% of the 60 experimental rounds.

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2.2.3. Experimental design
There were two conditions, cultural vs. acultural. One hundred and twenty participants
were assigned to the cultural condition, where they played the ‘‘Where is the rabbit?’’ game in
six-person groups. Social referencing about other members’ past behaviors was possible inthe cultural condition, when each participant judged the current state of the fluctuating
environment (the rabbit’s location). In contrast, 42 participants assigned to the acultural
condition played the game alone without the social referencing opportunity.
2.2.4. Procedure
For each hourly session, eight to ten participants came together to the laboratory. Upon
their arrival, we randomly assigned six participants to the cultural condition and the restto the acultural condition. Each participant was seated in a private booth and received
further instructions individually via computer. ‘‘Where is the rabbit?’’ was explained, andthe participants were instructed that they would play this game for many rounds(unspecified) and would gain 30 yen for each round in which they guessed the locationof the rabbit correctly.
For the six participants assigned to the cultural condition, a social learning opportunity wasprovided: Except for the first round, the preceding round judgments of three participants,
randomly sampled from the five group members other than self, were provided to eachparticipant for free. As discussed earlier, social learning provides statistically reliable
aggregated information that is cheap, but is possibly outdated because of environmental
change (the rabbit’s move). Besides the social/cultural information, these participants could
also obtain updated information about the current environment for cost, via individual
information search: In each round, participants could use a ‘‘rabbit-search-machine’’ by
paying 15 yen (investing 50% of the potential reward). The rabbit-search-machine provided
stochastic information about the rabbit’s location. (In the first round only, when no social
information was possible, these participants received this information for free.) In accordancewith the ‘‘lens model’’ paradigm (Brunswik, 1956), three perceptual cues were presented on
the computer screen that diagnosed the likelihood of the rabbit’s presence in each nest. By a
series of pilot tests, we set the overall accuracy of the cues so that using this individual
learning opportunity alone (i.e., without using social information) yielded 67% correct
judgments on average. In a practice session before the main experiment, participants were
given opportunities to familiarize themselves with the search machine and its accuracy.
In contrast, no social learning opportunity was provided to the participants assigned to theacultural condition. These participants worked alone throughout the experiment, and‘‘cultural transmission’’ via social referencing was not possible. Opportunity for individual
information search via the rabbit-search-machine was available as in the cultural condition.
After every five rounds, participants received feedback about their performances. In thecultural condition, a summary table of all six members’ cumulative rewards up to that point
was displayed on the computer screen after every five rounds. Likewise, a summary table ofone’s own cumulative rewards up to the point was provided in the acultural condition after
every five rounds. These forms of feedback provided an opportunity for participants to assess
the effectiveness of their learning strategies, permitting adaptive learning of learning

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strategies. It should also be noted that no direct feedback about the exact location of the rabbit
was provided at any point in the experiment; thus, direct learning of the rabbit’s exact location
was impossible.
After completing 60 rounds, participants answered a brief postsession manipulation checkquestionnaire, and were then paid and dismissed.
2.3. Results
2.3.1. Producer–scrounger dilemma in the cultural condition
When individual learning is costly and cheap social/cultural learning is possible, theproducer–scrounger dilemma would be expected to characterize interdependency in a group,
affecting the average quality of the cultural knowledge pool (Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002).
Fig. 2 displays the mean proportions of information producers (those who incurred the cost of
individual information search) in the six-person cultural groups over 60 experimental rounds,
as well as overall proportions of information producers in the acultural condition. As
expected, the proportion of information producers was smaller in the cultural than in theacultural condition, and the discrepancy between the two conditions became larger over time.
Dividing the 60 rounds into two blocks and composing six-person nominal groups in theacultural condition, a 2 (Learning: cultural vs. acultural)  2 (Block) repeated-measures
analysis of variance yielded a main effect for Learning [ F(1,25) = 26.98, P < .0001], a main
effect for Block [ F(1,25) = 32.5, P < .0001], and a Learning  Block interaction effect[ F(1,25) = 4.23, P = .05].
To see if the proportion of information producers was approaching equilibrium over timein the cultural condition (as predicted for the producer– scrounger game; Kameda &Nakanishi, 2002), we examined changes in the variance of this proportion among groups.

Fig. 2. Mean proportions of information producers (members who engage in costly individual information search)in the population over time (experiment).

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If the proportion was indeed approaching equilibrium in the cultural condition, its betweengroups variance should decrease over rounds. A multiple regression analysis of the betweengroups variances, with experimental round as a predictor, revealed that the regression line hada negative slope (b = .35, P < .01), confirming that variability in the proportion that were
information producers decreased as play progressed. A similar analysis of within-groups
variances that indexed fluctuations in the proportion within each group yielded the same
pattern. Mean within-groups variances were 0.039 for the first block, and 0.027 for thesecond block [t(19) = 4.84, P < .001]. A further analysis revealed that the data were better
described as a polymorphic equilibrium where ‘‘division of roles’’ about costly information
search existed among members (producers vs. scroungers), than as a monomorphic equilibrium where all members played the identical mixed strategy, replicating Kameda andNakanishi’s (2002) observation about the equilibrium composition.
2.3.2. Does cultural transmission increase mean fitness?
The above results clearly indicate that the producer–scrounger dilemma characterized
members’ interdependency in the cultural groups. As Rogers (1988) argued, such a gametheoretic structure may undermine the adaptive value of cultural transmission in a temporally
fluctuating environment as studied here.
We examined the Rogers thesis by first focusing on monetary rewards that participants
earned in the experiment, as a laboratory counterpart of fitness. Fig. 3 displays meanmonetary rewards in the cultural and acultural conditions for the first and second blocks. On
average, participants earned more reward in the cultural condition (M = 878 yen) than in theacultural condition (M = 794 yen); a 2 (Learning)  2 (Block) ANOVA yielded a significant
main effect for Learning [ F(1,160) = 7.63, P < .01]. No other effects were significant [Block:F(1,160) = .53, P = .47; Learning  Block interaction: F(1,160) = .78, P = .38].

Fig. 3. Mean monetary rewards (with an S.D.) that participants earned in the cultural and acultural conditions(experiment).

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We also examined participants’ success rates in locating the rabbit correctly. Fig. 4 displays
the mean number of rounds (out of 30 for each block) in which participants got the rabbit’s
location right. Interestingly, unlike the monetary reward measure, this ‘‘pure accuracy’’measure showed no advantage of cultural transmission. In fact, although the two conditions
yielded comparable accuracies in the first half of the experiment, the cultural condition
became less accurate than the acultural condition in the second half of the experiment; a2 (Learning)  2 (Block) ANOVA yielded a marginal effect for Learning  Block interaction[ F(1,160) = 3.69, P = .057]. No other effects were significant [Learning: F(1,160) = 2.70,
P = .103; Block: F(1,160) = 1.99, P = .160].
Taken together, these patterns imply the following. The producer–scrounger dilemma in
information provision (Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002) yielded a mixed Nash equilibrium in thecultural population over time (Fig. 2). The proportion of information producers at equilibrium
was smaller in the cultural condition than in the acultural condition, which degraded thequality of the cultural knowledge pool and hence judgmental accuracy (Fig. 4). However,lower search costs compensated for this loss of accuracy, and the cultural population was
better off than the acultural population in terms of mean fitness (Fig. 3). These results imply
that the net advantage of cultural transmission (e.g., aggregated information, saving of
information-search cost via social learning) may indeed outweigh its disadvantage accruing
from the free-rider problem in producer–scrounger dilemma.
2.4. Discussion
The experimental results confirmed that the producer–scrounger problem is inherent incultural groups where social learning opportunity is readily available and individual
information acquisition is costly in terms of time, energy, risk, and other resources(cf. Giraldeau & Caraco, 2000; Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002). However, the notion thatsocial/cultural learning cannot increase mean fitness of the cultural population because of theFig. 4. Mean judgmental accuracies (with an SD) in the cultural and acultural conditions (experiment).

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producer–scrounger dilemma was not supported by the experiment. Overall fitness, as
indexed by mean monetary reward that participants earned in the experiment, was higher inthe cultural than the acultural condition.
Why this difference between the theory and empirical data? Let us revisit the Rogers
model. Although the experimental setting could be different from the model in several ways,
one of the most conceptually important differences may be in cognitive characteristics
assumed for ‘‘individual learners.’’ Rogers (1988) defined individual learners as those who
engage in costly individual information search and always disregard social information.
These agents are not only information producers, but are also blind to social/cultural
information even when it is readily available. For this reason, their fitness is unaffected by
the number of ‘‘imitators’’ (information scroungers; Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002) in the
population (see Fig. 1).
However, this characterization may be unrealistic in human cases. The social psychological literature has shown that humans are selective information users, adjusting theirreliance on individually acquired information dependent on its diagnosticity (e.g., Festinger, 1950; Sherif, 1936). For example, in a classical paper on attitude formation,
Festinger (1954) argued that humans turn to ‘‘social comparison’’ when ‘‘physical reality
checks’’ do not provide unambiguous information for assessing the validity of their beliefs.
If Rogers’s organisms were ‘‘cognitively flexible’’ in this sense, it might be the case thatsocial/cultural learning not only benefits imitators by saving costs, but also helps
individual learners improve their judgmental accuracy, contributing to the overall qualityof the cultural knowledge pool (cf. Boyd & Richerson, 1995). Of course, this reasoning
could be wrong. Cognitive flexibility makes the individual learners more vulnerable to the
influence of imitators as well, which may reduce rather than enhance their accuracy. In
this sense, cognitive flexibility may work as a double-edged sword in a temporally
fluctuating environment.
To test if the above reasoning is correct, it is necessary to distinguish conceptually between
an information-search strategy (produce or scrounge) and an information-use strategy (relative
weighting for individual and social/cultural information), at least for human individual
learners. The Rogers model did not make this distinction, assuming that information
producers do not use social/cultural information at all, even if it is readily available. We thus
revisit Rogers’s question in the next section by a theoretical model that incorporates the above
features. We report a series of evolutionary computer simulations exploring the fitness
advantage of cultural transmission in a temporally fluctuating environment.

3. Evolutionary computer simulation
The purpose of this simulation was to reexamine the Rogers question in a wider parametricspace. Although informative, the experimental test above was limited in that it could assess
only a small subset of the space. Computer simulations are useful for seeing how robust such
experimental results may be in other parametric conditions. In this simulation, we use atheoretical model proposed earlier (Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002), which is an extension of

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theoretical work on cultural transmission by Boyd and Richerson (1985, 1995) and Henrichand Boyd (1998), and which has been demonstrated to predict actual human learning well in a
temporally fluctuating laboratory setting (see Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002 for details). Using
this model, we compare mean fitness of cultural and acultural populations while varying key
parameters of the model systematically.
3.1. Model and algorithm
Fig. 5 shows a simulation algorithm of our model. Like Rogers (1988), we assume that theenvironment can change between two states, A and B, with a small probability in any twoconsecutive generations. Behavior A is more fit if the environment is in State A, andBehavior B when in State B. Natural selection favors learning mechanisms that makeFig. 5. An outline of Kameda and Nakanishi’s (2002) simulation algorithm about evolvability of culturallearning capacities.

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individuals more likely to adopt the behavior that is adaptive in the current environment(see Fig. 5, bottom). As in the experiment, we created cultural and acultural populations andcontinued simulation runs until an equilibrium state emerged in each population.
In the cultural population, two information sources are available for agents: opportunities
for individual learning and social learning. The individual learning opportunity is optional
and its usage requires paying a cost. The social learning opportunity is default, providing
information about the choices of several cultural parents in the preceding generation for free.
Each cultural agent combines the two kinds of information to decide how to behave. Three‘‘genes’’ are pertinent to this combination. A first gene represents each agent’s informationsearch strategy, which is central to the Rogers (1988) argument. Haploid agents with the ‘‘on’’
allele at this locus are information producers who pay the extra cost for updated environmental information; those with the ‘‘off’’ allele are information scroungers.
The other two genes represent the cultural agent’s information-use strategy. One gene
controls variations in propensity to use social information over individually acquired
information, representing the ‘‘cognitive flexibility’’ discussed above (Boyd & Richerson,1995). Environmental information, if acquired via costly search, contains random noise, sothat even though the signal suggests that the current environment is in State A, it may
actually be in State B. As in the signal detection theory (Green & Swets 1966), the model
assumed that each cultural agent has a decision threshold and if the signal value exceeds it,
the agent makes a choice suggested by the individually acquired information (e.g., adopting
Behavior A). However, if the signal is insufficiently diagnostic, the agent disregards theindividual information and relies solely on social information (Festinger, 1954). Individual
variations about the threshold were represented as effects of a gene in the simulation. (Thisgene was inactivated for information scroungers who had no individually acquired information and always used social information.)
Another information-use gene regulates individual variations in conformity bias whenusing social information (Boyd & Richerson, 1985). If the environmental signal isinsufficiently diagnostic (or if the agent behaves as an information scrounger), theindividual relies on social information. Suppose that two of three cultural parents chose
Behavior A, while one chose Behavior B. The model conceptualizes the degree of‘‘conformity bias’’ as a likelihood of preferentially adopting the most frequent behavior
among the cultural parents. In this example, agents with no conformity bias adopt Behavior
A proportionally (with a 67% chance), having no tendency to focus preferentially on themost common behavior. Agents with a full conformity bias adopt Behavior A with a 100%chance, always following the majority view. Combining individual and social information
as determined by these three genes, each agent in the cultural population — the ‘‘culturalFestinger population,’’ hereafter to be distinguished from the following ‘‘cultural-Rogers
population’’ — makes a behavioral choice.
As a benchmark, we also created another cultural population where agents behaved asassumed by Rogers (1988). In this ‘‘cultural-Rogers population,’’ information producers(Rogers’s individual learners) always rely on the individually acquired information, discarding the social information completely. Technically, throughout the simulation runs, theirpropensity to use social information over individually acquired information (controlled by the

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2nd gene) was fixed at 0, and their 3rd gene (conformity bias) was also inactivated; these
individual learners are cognitively inflexible, always committing themselves to the individually acquired information. Information scroungers (Rogers’s imitators) behave in the samemanner as in the cultural-Festinger population.
In the acultural population, opportunity for social learning is unavailable to agents from theoutset. The only gene pertinent to the acultural agents is the 1st gene, controlling variations in
the costly individual information search. Agents with the ‘‘on’’ allele at this locus acquire
updated environmental information for cost and choose a behavior suggested by the
information; agents with the ‘‘off’’ allele choose one of the two behaviors randomly.
Then, in all populations, natural selection operates: Those who behave adaptively gain aslight survival advantage, and with the relevant genes transmitted in a haploid, asexual
fashion, the genes and resultant learning mechanisms that generate adaptive behavior in thecurrent environment increase in each population gradually. The simulation repeats this process
for many generations until an equilibrium state emerges in each population. We then compare
mean fitness of the cultural and acultural populations at their respective equilibria.
3.2. Results and discussion
Three simulation parameters are critical to reexamine the Rogers question theoretically:
extra cost required for individual information search (Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002; Rogers,
1988), accuracy of the environmental information, and rate of environmental fluctuation(Henrich & Boyd, 1998; Richerson & Boyd, 2000). For each set of parameter values, we

Fig. 6. Mean fitness of the cultural and acultural populations at the respective equilibria as a function of individual
information-search cost (simulation: see text for the parametric setting). Mean fitness could range from 1.0 to 1.1.

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conducted 10 simulation runs over 100,000 generations for the cultural (Festinger, Rogers)
and acultural populations, respectively, and we averaged the results.
Fig. 6 displays mean fitness of the cultural and acultural populations at their respective
equilibria as a function of individual information-search cost, which was varied systematically while keeping the other simulation parameters unchanged. The simulation parameters in
Fig. 6 were set as follows: rate of environmental fluctuation = 0.04, average accuracy ofenvironmental information = 0.66. The fitness value of choosing an adaptive behavior in thecurrent environment was fixed at 0.1, and the baseline fitness was 1.0. Thus, mean fitness
shown in Fig. 6 (and in Fig. 8) could range from 1.0 to 1.1. The number of cultural parents
was 3 for all simulation runs reported in this paper.
First, notice that mean fitness of the cultural-Rogers population was exactly identical tothat of the acultural population for the range of information-search cost shown in Fig. 6. This
verifies Rogers’s analysis. However, mean fitness of the cultural-Festinger population was
higher than that of the acultural population. Fig. 7 displays equilibrium proportions of
information producers in each population again as a function of the search cost. The figure
shows that the producer proportion decreased rapidly in the cultural-Festinger population
with an increase in the search cost; for example, when the search cost was 0.0054 (5.4% of
the benefit from choosing an adaptive behavior), the equilibrium proportion of information
producers was about 13% in the cultural population, while it was 100% in the acultural
population. Still, even with such a small proportion of information producers, the cultural-

Fig. 7. Mean equilibrium proportions of information producers in the cultural and acultural populations as afunction of individual information-search cost (simulation: see text for the parametric setting).

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Festinger population outperformed the acultural population in mean fitness (Fig. 6). Thispattern is consistent with the results of the behavioral experiment.
How robust is this result across parameter values? We conducted a sensitivity analysis byvarying two of the key parameters (information-search cost and rate of environmental
fluctuation) simultaneously, while keeping the third parameter unchanged (accuracy ofenvironmental information = 0.66). Fig. 8 shows mean fitness of the cultural and acultural
populations at the respective equilibria. As can be seen, mean fitness of the cultural
population was again higher than that of the acultural population for the entire parameter
space examined. The ‘‘cultural population’’ hereafter refers to the cultural-Festinger
population. Mean fitness of the cultural-Rogers population was identical to that of theacultural population.
A simple thought experiment may further help to see what happens outside the parameter
space shown in Fig. 8. Start with the rate of environmental fluctuation: What if theenvironment becomes more variable? The most extreme case in the focal two-state
environment is the one with a 0.5 fluctuation rate. All else being equal, all agents in thecultural population should become information producers, and their ‘‘propensity to use social
information over individually-acquired information’’ (Festinger, 1950, 1954; see Section 3.1)
should also become minimal, because cultural information has no value with the 0.5
fluctuation rate. This means that agents in the cultural population will behave exactly as
the acultural agents, and there should be no difference in mean fitness between the two
populations in the most extreme case; given the monotonically decreasing pattern in Fig. 8,

Fig. 8. Mean fitness of the cultural and acultural populations at the respective equilibria as a function of individual
information-search cost and rate of environmental fluctuation (simulation: see text for the parametric setting).

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this implies that the cultural population is more fit than the acultural population even whenthe environment is highly variable (i.e., even if it is close to but less than 0.5).
What, then, if the individual information-search cost gets larger? As shown in Fig. 7, thenumber of information producers decreases monotonically with an increase in the search cost.
The most extreme case is the one where cost required for the search exceeds the net advantage
accruing from it, with no information producers in the population. In this most extreme case,agents in both cultural and acultural populations are vulnerable to the environmental
variability completely, being no different from each other in mean fitness. Again, given
the monotonically decreasing pattern in Fig. 8, this implies that the cultural population ismore fit than the acultural population as long as the search cost is bearable so that some of its
members acquire updated environmental information.
We also conducted a sensitivity analysis varying the accuracy of environmental information systematically. The general conclusion is unchanged: The cultural population is more fit
than the acultural population for a broad range of parameter values. The advantage of thecultural population over the acultural population takes an inverted-U shape of information
accuracy, being maximized when the environmental information is moderately accurate (cf.
Henrich & Boyd, 1998). When the environmental information is perfectly accurate (i.e., noisefree), there is no fitness difference between the cultural and acultural populations.

4. General discussion
In this paper, we revisited the Rogers question, examining the uncertainty-reduction
function of cultural transmission in a nonstationary uncertain environment. Although the
producer–scrounger dilemma about information provision (Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002)
clearly characterized the members’ interdependency in the cultural population, the cultural
population was found to be more fit than the acultural population in both the behavioral
experiment and the simulations. In other words, the mixed cultural equilibrium as a result ofindividual-level fitness maximization is also Pareto-efficient at the group level, compared tothe acultural equilibrium.
4.1. Discrepancies between the Rogers model and our experiment/simulation setting?
Before discussing the implications of these results, it may be useful to check once again therelationship between the Rogers model and the setting we used in this paper. Besides the‘‘cognitive flexibility’’ of agents, there may be other factors that could be responsible forthe differential results between the two studies. For example, our agents could refer to several‘‘cultural parents,’’ with a conformity bias to focus preferentially on the most common behavior
among them (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Henrich & Boyd, 1998; see also Kameda, Tindale, &Davis, in press for related empirical findings in social psychology), but these features wereabsent, as Rogers’s agents received social information from only one cultural parent. Are these
additional features responsible for the differential results? The answer is negative. To see why,
let us suppose that as in our model, the imitators in Rogers’s (1988) model refer to more than one

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cultural parent under a conformity bias. These changes would certainly affect the steepness ofFig. 1’s fitness curve for imitators, but they should have no impact on the fitness of individual
learners. Thus, as long as the individual learners remain completely asocial, making theimitators more social would not affect the Rogers model’s key conclusion that culturaltransmission does not increase mean fitness of the cultural population.
Another criticism of our approach may be that we isolated the cultural agents from theacultural agents in separate populations from the outset, focusing only on their populationlevel fitness at the respective equilibria. What if we have two types of agents in the same
population and place them under the evolutionary control? Is cultural learning an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) that outperforms acultural learning in such a mixed population?
We addressed this question in additional computer simulations that extended the model
reported in this paper. In the extended simulation, we introduced a fourth gene controllingcultural or acultural learning, such that haploid agents with the ‘‘on’’ allele at this locus were
cultural agents engaging in social information search for cost, while those with the ‘‘off’’
allele were acultural agents skipping the social information search. The only difference fromthe original simulation was that social information was not given for free, but was provided
only to the cultural agents who paid extra cost for it. Although space does not allow us toreport the results in detail, the overall conclusion is unchanged from the original simulation.
As long as social information search is cheaper than individual information search and if theenvironment is not too unstable (both of which are basic assumptions of standard models ofcultural transmission; cf. Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Cavalli-Sforza, & Feldman, 1981;
Rogers, 1988), all agents in the population become cultural agents at the equilibrium. Someof these cultural agents are information producers who also engage in individual information
search for extra cost, but others are information scroungers, constituting a mixed Nashequilibrium as in the original simulation. Taken together, these results provide further support
for our argument that cultural agents are more fit than acultural agents for a broad range ofparameters, at both the individual and population levels.
4.2. Implications and future directions
The empirical and theoretical developments in this paper imply that the ‘‘cognitive
flexibility’’ of agents is likely to be a key for cultural transmission to be beneficial in a
nonstationary uncertain environment. If agents are ‘‘Festingerian’’ and can switch to social
information contingent on the diagnosticity of individually acquired information (Festinger,
1950, 1954), cultural learning not only benefits the information scroungers, by cost-saving,
but also benefits the information producers by increasing their average accuracy (Boyd &Richerson, 1995; Laland, Richerson, & Boyd, 1996). In other words, cultural transmissionfunctions as an effective collective uncertainty-reduction device, even though the producer–
scrounger problem severely qualifies provision of updated information about the current
environment. Festinger (1950, 1954) argued that humans possess such a cognitive flexibility,
but he was silent about nonhuman animals. However, this type of cognitive ability may
indeed be found among nonhuman animals as well, which may explain the existence ofsocial learning in many group-living species. ‘‘Culture’’ at this level (i.e., behavioral

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variations acquired and maintained by social learning) is widely observed in the animal
kingdom (e.g., Galef & Whiskin, 2001; Giraldeau & Caraco, 2000; Heyes & Galef, 1996;
Laland et al., 2000; Lefebvre, 2000; Rendall & Whitehead, 2001).
However, most of such ‘‘proto-cultures’’ are noncumulative. As argued by various
theorists, human culture is uniquely cumulative (e.g., Boyd & Richerson, 1996; Durham,
1991; Richerson & Boyd, 2000). No single individual could ever invent the humansubsistence systems, artistic productions, ideologies, religions, etc. that have existed overextended periods of time. The evidence so far suggests that cumulative cultural evolution islimited to humans, song birds, and perhaps chimpanzees. Why so? How could the humancognitive capacities that have enabled us to accumulate complex knowledge or sophisticatedskills in the population over so many generations evolve? These bigger issues are beyond thescope of this paper. However, future work on adaptive value of cultural transmission should
be directed to such issues, because the core merits of human cultures (e.g., technologies)
depend fundamentally on our capacity for ‘‘true imitation’’ (Boyd & Richerson, 1996;
Tomassello, 1996).

Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research 14310048 from
the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan. We are gratefulto Alan Rogers, Peter Richerson, Reid Hastie, Joseph Whitmeyer, Yohsuke Ohtsubo, Keiko
Ishii, Ryo Tamura, Mizuho Shinada, and Takafumi Tsukasaki for their helpful comments onan earlier version of this manuscript, and Martin Daly and Margo Wilson for their valuable
editorial help.

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