The gullible genius: fast learners fall for fake news
(2022) Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology — Vol. 76, n° 1, p. 1-12 (2022)
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- Abstract
- In many animals, decision-making is influenced by social learning, i.e. the acquisition of insights through the observation of other individuals’ behaviours. In cases where such socially obtained information conflicts with personally acquired knowledge, animals must weigh up one form of information against the other. Previous studies have found that individual animals differ consistently in how they trade-off socially versus personally acquired knowledge, but why this is so remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate whether an animal’s cognitive profile affects its decision to use either prior personal or new, conflicting social information, using the Italian wall lizard (Podarcis siculus) as our model species. We trained lizards to associate one of two colour cues with food, and subsequently allowed them to observe a conspecific trained for the opposite colour. After social demonstrations, lizards overall tended to use the ‘fake’, non-rewarding social information, but some individuals were more likely to do so than others. Lizards that showed faster spatial learning were more likely to copy social information even in the presence of reliable previous knowledge. Our study highlights the existence of significant inter-individual variation in social learning in a lizard, possibly mirroring variation in cognitive abilities.
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Gavriilidi, I., Baeckens, S., De Meester, G., Van Linden, L., & Van Damme, R. (2022). The gullible genius: fast learners fall for fake news. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 76(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-021-03122-0 (Original work published 2022)