Asocial learners (information producers) typically incur additional temporal or energetic costs as well as risk of mortality or injury associated with learning from direct interaction with the environment. While social learners (information scroungers) can acquire information relatively cheaply (i.e. they are free-riders), they are more liable than asocial learners to acquire outdated information that has no associated fitness benefit in a changing environment.
Two important consequences: a) copy-cat behavior is evolutionary successful and, therefore, should be rampant in a population; b) innovators are always at a disadvantage, unless they can preserve informational "distance" between themselves and the copy-cats.
Since the majority of the population consists of copy-cats, it benefits the society as a whole to distribute new useful information as fast as possible. On the other hand, if innovators cannot use the information to their own advantage, eventually, all innovation stops.
In many ways, human history is a series of continuous attempts to break through the trade-off. Today, we've got patent systems to, more or less, protect inventions; we've got Nobel Prizes and celebrity awards to encourage people share their ideas; we've got the open source movement where people earn reputations in exchange for their code contributions; etc. Most likely, social networking will create completely new incentives for sharing ideas and exploiting human propensity for social learning.
References:
1. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2009.05.029 Kendal J. et al., 2009. The evolution of social learning rules: Payoff-biased and frequency-dependent biased transmission. Journal of Theoretical Biology Volume 260, Issue 2, 21 September 2009, Pages 210-219
2. DOI: 10.1126/science.1184719 Rendell L, et al. 2010. Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament. Science 9 April 2010: Vol. 328. no. 5975, pp. 208 - 213.
tags: innovation, invention, problem, solution, tradeoff, dilemma, information, evolution, games, learning, education, market
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