Simple Learning and Decision Mechanisms Underlying Culture
Peter Todd
ABC, Max Planck
Simple mechanisms for gathering information from social partners, and for making
decisions on the basis of that information, may underlie the construction of socially
shared (cultural) knowledge. In turn, when these mechanisms are used by a group of
individuals, they can affect the distribution of behavior at the population level. I will
show these effects through a simulation of the use of the recognition heuristic for
decision making in a population of simple agents that exchange information with each
other, in which a J-shaped distribution of behavior emerges.