Why Lasting Progress Depends on Freedom: Sustainability and Conformity Don't Mix скачать в хорошем качестве

Why Lasting Progress Depends on Freedom: Sustainability and Conformity Don't Mix

Sustainability and Conformity Don't Mix #science #education #psychology #evolution Social science can help us design pathways to sustainable futures, I and other researchers are convinced—but pinning down exactly what each social science discipline teaches us is less clear. In this lecture I introduce the prevalence dynamic formulation of population dynamics specifically for studying behavior change—in a future lecture I will demonstrate how to derive the prevalence dynamic from the replicator dynamic that describes how group sizes change when each group has a different replication rate. I sketch and analyze the prevalence dynamic for conformity and success learning heuristics to show that preferring to do what the majority does (conformity) is less reliable for promoting uncommon sustainable practices compared to a heuristic that guides individuals to prefer successful peers as teachers. This demonstrates the power that evolutionary population dynamics models like this can provide to Social Science for Sustainability. This finding also suggests conformity should play a smaller role in human cultural evolution than in other animals. Humans can draw on more adaptive, cognitively rich strategies—including theory of mind to infer how others see, succeed, and find meaning in their choices. It seems these higher faculties are more likely to be our primary guides, rather than conformity used even by tiny fishes [1]. Kendal, J. R., Rendell, L., Pike, T. W., & Laland, K. N. (2009). Nine-spined sticklebacks deploy a hill-climbing social learning strategy. Behavioral Ecology, 20(2), 238–244.