What is it about?
In everyday life, we constantly learn from others—friends, coworkers, online reviewers, and even AI tools. This social learning helps us make decisions quickly, but it can also push crowds toward the wrong choice, as seen in financial bubbles or viral misinformation. Our study explores two basic ways people learn from others: one favors quick agreement, and the other supports flexibility when conditions change. Using computer simulations, we found that groups work best when both learning styles coexist. The results offer guidance for building healthier online platforms and human–AI systems that remain adaptable and avoid harmful mass behaviors.
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Why is it important?
Understanding how people learn from each other is increasingly crucial in a world shaped by social media, rapid technological change, and emerging AI systems. Our study is the first to show how two fundamental forms of social learning—one that accelerates agreement and one that preserves flexibility—interact to shape collective success or failure. By revealing when social learning improves group intelligence and when it causes harmful herding, this work provides timely insight into how to design more resilient human and AI-driven decision systems. These findings can inform policies and platform designs aimed at reducing misinformation cascades and promoting healthier collective behavior.
Perspectives
This work fills a major gap by showing how two widely studied social learning algorithms—value shaping and decision biasing—interact to influence collective performance in dynamic environments. Past research examined these mechanisms at the individual level; our study uniquely demonstrates their group-level and evolutionary consequences. By identifying conditions under which social learning enhances or undermines collective intelligence, the findings offer a new framework for understanding coordination, flexibility, and maladaptive herding across disciplines, from cognitive science to cultural evolution and artificial intelligence.
Tatsuya Kameda
Meiji Gakuin University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: How social learning enhances—or undermines—efficiency and flexibility in collective decision-making under uncertainty, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2516827122.
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