Social Learning in a Human Society: An Experimental Study

Understand

This paper presents an experimental study to investigate the learning and decision making behavior of individuals in a human society.

• Social learning is used as the mathematical basis for modelling interaction of individuals that aim to perform a perceptual task interactively.
• A psychology experiment was conducted on a group of undergraduate students at the University of British Columbia to examine whether the decision (action) of one individual affects the decision of the subsequent individuals.
• The major experimental observation that stands out here is that the participants of the experiment (agents) were affected by decisions of their partners in a relatively large fraction (60%) of trials.