Most research on transmission biases in cultural evolution has treated different biases as distinct strategies. Here I present a model that combines both frequency dependent bias (including conformist bias) and payoff bias in a single decision-making calculus and show that such an integrated learning strategy may be superior to relying on either bias alone. Natural selection may operate on humans’ relative dependence on frequency and payoff information, but both are likely to contribute to the spread of variants with high payoffs. Importantly, the magnitude of conformist bias affects the evolutionary dynamics, and I show that an intermediate level of conformity may be most adaptive and may spontaneously evolve as it resists the invasion of low-payoff variants yet enables the fixation of high-payoff variants in the population.

大多数关于文化进化中传播偏差的研究都将不同的偏差视为不同的策略。在这里，我提出了一个模型，该模型在单个决策演算中结合了频率相关偏差（包括顺从偏差）和回报偏差，并表明这种综合学习策略可能优于单独依赖任一偏差。自然选择可能会影响人类对频率和回报信息的相对依赖，但这两者都可能有助于高回报变异的传播。重要的是，顺从偏见的程度会影响进化动态，我表明，中间水平的顺从可能是最具适应性的，并且可能会自发地进化，因为它抵制低回报变体的入侵，同时又能够将高回报变体固定在环境中。人口。