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Conformity and eccentricity; driving forces of cultural evolution
Kutsos, Peter ; Tureček, Petr (advisor) ; Šaffa, Gabriel (referee)
When deciding between alternative strategies, animals often have to operate with limited or conflicting information. In these situations, what source of information they prioritize can make a huge difference. Individuals relying on social information (social learners) economize on costs like the risk of eating the wrong food or the energy needed to survey the environment but run the risk of the information they use being out of date or of low quality. On the other hand, those who prioritize individual learning can be more confident in the accuracy of their information, but without any social learning are forced to "reinvent the wheel" every generation. Natural selection has shaped several adaptive heuristic rules which help inform social learning. One category of these rules is frequency-dependent, which means that the probability of behavioural pattern acquisition depends on how common (or rare) they are in a population. This work is a literature review regarding two such rules: conformity and anticonformity and the roles they play in cultural evolution. Keywords: Frequency-dependent transmission, cultural evolution, social learning, conformity bias, anticonformity
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