Face preferences affect a diverse range of critical social outcomes, from mate choices and decisions about platonic relationships to hiring decisions and decisions about social exchange. Firstly, we review the facial characteristics that influence attractiveness judgements of faces (e.g. symmetry, sexually dimorphic shape cues, averageness, skin colour/texture and cues to personality) and then review several important sources of individual differences in face preferences (e.g. hormone levels and fertility, own attractiveness and personality, visual experience, familiarity and imprinting, social learning). The research relating to these issues highlights flexible, sophisticated systems that support and promote adaptive responses to faces that appear to function to maximize the benefits of both our mate choices and more general decisions about other types of social partners.

/pdf/facial-attractiveness-evolutionary-based-research-53268i4egm.pdf

Facial attractiveness: evolutionary based research.

Social animals including humans share a range of social mechanisms that are automatic and implicit and enable learning by observation. Learning from others includes imitation of actions and mirroring of emotions. Learning about others, such as their group membership and reputation, is crucial for social interactions that depend on trust. For accurate prediction of others’ changeable dispositions, mentalizing is required, i.e., tracking of intentions, desires, and beliefs. Implicit mentalizing is present in infants less than one year old as well as in some nonhuman species. Explicit mentalizing is a meta-cognitive process and enhances the ability to learn about the world through self-monitoring and reflection, and may be uniquely human. Meta-cognitive processes can also exert control over automatic behavior, for instance, when short-term gains oppose long-term aims or when selfish and prosocial interests collide. We suggest that they also underlie the ability to explicitly share experiences with other agents, as in reflective discussion and teaching. These are key in increasing the accuracy of the models of the world that we construct.

Mechanisms of Social Cognition

Cognition presents evolutionary research with one of its greatest challenges. Cognitive evolution has been explained at the proximate level by shifts in absolute and relative brain volume and at the ultimate level by differences in social and dietary complexity. However, no study has integrated the experimental and phylogenetic approach at the scale required to rigorously test these explanations. Instead, previous research has largely relied on various measures of brain size as proxies for cognitive abilities. We experimentally evaluated these major evolutionary explanations by quantitatively comparing the cognitive performance of 567 individuals representing 36 species on two problem-solving tasks measuring self-control. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that absolute brain volume best predicted performance across species and accounted for considerably more variance than brain volume controlling for body mass. This result corroborates recent advances in evolutionary neurobiology and illustrates the cognitive consequences of cortical reorganization through increases in brain volume. Within primates, dietary breadth but not social group size was a strong predictor of species differences in self-control. Our results implicate robust evolutionary relationships between dietary breadth, absolute brain volume, and self-control. These findings provide a significant first step toward quantifying the primate cognitive phenome and explaining the process of cognitive evolution.

/pdf/the-evolution-of-self-control-3al3d35bmk.pdf

The evolution of self-control

In human societies, cultural norms arise when behaviours are transmitted through social networks via high-fidelity social learning. However, a paucity of experimental studies has meant that there is no comparable understanding of the process by which socially transmitted behaviours might spread and persist in animal populations. Here we show experimental evidence of the establishment of foraging traditions in a wild bird population. We introduced alternative novel foraging techniques into replicated wild sub-populations of great tits (Parus major) and used automated tracking to map the diffusion, establishment and long-term persistence of the seeded innovations. Furthermore, we used social network analysis to examine the social factors that influenced diffusion dynamics. From only two trained birds in each sub-population, the information spread rapidly through social network ties, to reach an average of 75% of individuals, with a total of 414 knowledgeable individuals performing 57,909 solutions over all replicates. The sub-populations were heavily biased towards using the technique that was originally introduced, resulting in established local traditions that were stable over two generations, despite a high population turnover. Finally, we demonstrate a strong effect of social conformity, with individuals disproportionately adopting the most frequent local variant when first acquiring an innovation, and continuing to favour social information over personal information. Cultural conformity is thought to be a key factor in the evolution of complex culture in humans. In providing the first experimental demonstration of conformity in a wild non-primate, and of cultural norms in foraging techniques in any wild animal, our results suggest a much broader taxonomic occurrence of such an apparently complex cultural behaviour.

/pdf/experimentally-induced-innovations-lead-to-persistent-4pjuslb9cf.pdf

Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds

Research across species highlights the critical role of the amygdala in fear conditioning. However, fear conditioning, involving direct aversive experience, is only one means by which fears can be acquired. Exploiting aversive experiences of other individuals through social fear learning is less risky. Behavioral research provides important insights into the workings of social fear learning, and the neural mechanisms are beginning to be understood. We review research suggesting that an amygdala-centered model of fear conditioning can help to explain social learning of fear through observation and instruction. We also describe how observational and instructed fear is distinguished by involvement of additional neural systems implicated in social-emotional behavior, language and explicit memory, and propose a modified conditioning model to account for social fear learning. A better understanding of social fear learning promotes integration of biological principles of learning with cultural evolution.

Social learning of fear.

The last two decades have seen a virtual explosion in empirical research on the role of social interactions in the development of animals' behavioral repertoires, and a similar increase in attention to formal models of social learning. Here we first review recent empirical evidence of social influences on food choice, tool use, patterns of movement, predator avoidance, mate choice, and courtship, and then consider formal models of when animals choose to copy behavior, and which other animals' behavior they copy, together with empirical tests of predictions from those models.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1641/0006-3568(2005)055%5B0489:SLIAES%5D2.0.CO;2

Social Learning in Animals: Empirical Studies and Theoretical Models

Since many years, researchers are engaged in experiments that are designed both to analyze the behavioral processes that permit one Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) to influence another's selection of food and to determine how such social influences might facilitate the development of adaptive feeding repertoires by free-living rats. The relative ease with which social influences on selection of food by rats can be studied in the laboratory has made social transmission of food preferences in rats a particularly fruitful model system to study social learning processes at all stages in the life cycle. A few days after parturition, when infant rats are still totally dependent on their dam for nutriment, they receive information through their mother's milk about flavors of food that she is ingesting. This chapter is designed to review the work describing changes in rats' food preferences following social interactions at a distance from a feeding site with conspecifics that have recently eaten. Studies of social influence on food preference in rats have resulted in the discovery of a previously unsuspected major determinant of diet choice. Such studies have also provided a useful model system to explore the ways in which social interactions can modulate behavioral development. This chapter closes with the conclusion that investigations of social learning processes are likely to provide insight into how locally adaptive patterns of behavior are acquired.

CHAPTER 3 – Social Enhancement of Food Preferences in Norway Rats: A Brief Review1

14 – Development of Flavor Preference in Man and Animals: The Role of Social and Nonsocial Factors

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1641/0006-3568(2004)054[0262:CLBMLI]2.0.CO;2

Bennett G. Galef

Papers

Social Learning in Animals: Empirical Studies and Theoretical Models

CHAPTER 3 – Social Enhancement of Food Preferences in Norway Rats: A Brief Review1

14 – Development of Flavor Preference in Man and Animals: The Role of Social and Nonsocial Factors

Complexity, Like Beauty, may Lie in the Eye of the Beholder