Social learning and cultural evolution

The strategies people use when they learn from others drive cultural evolution. The question then is, what strategies do people use? Moreover, what kinds of cultural evolution actually follow from a population with a certain distribution of social learning strategies? A number of lab members use both models and experiments to examine these questions. In particular, we have and continue to run experiments with a wide range of subject pools. These include Bolivian pastoralists, Sudanese pastoralists and farmers, WEIRD subjects from several countries, Indian students, Kenyans (students and otherwise), highly partisan Republicans/Democrats in the U.S., and children in Switzerland. The following seems clear; within and across diverse subject pools, people learn from each other in wildly heterogeneous ways.