Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We suggest that some of the mechanisms underlying network effects on cultural evolution are intuitively accessible to laypeople, and may be part of the suite of social learning strategies underlying the human capacity for cumulative culture. Interest in the psychological mechanisms underlying this capacity typically focuses on learners’ ability to identify reliable sources and capacity for high-fidelity imitation. Yet, at the population level, research suggests that network structures themselves may influence cumulative learning by changing individuals’ explore-exploit patterns. In our experiments, adults infer that more proximal or distal clusters in a fragmented network will have more similar or dissimilar technological “styles”, and prefer to seek advice from more distant experts when asked to innovate, but more proximate experts when asked to remember. Commonsense intuitions about how social networks shape our access to information and diversity- fidelity tradeoffs for memory and innovation may make us more effective social learners.