The Concept
The concept for this edition is the “Costly Information Theory” and “Learning Biases”.
The theory focuses on the evolutionary trade-offs between procuring accurate behavioural information at high cost and less accurate information at a lower cost.
As per our current understanding, humans have various biases or cultural learning mechanisms that allow the acquisition of useful traits from other people at a lower cost. Hence avoiding the costly process getting information themselves.
They can be categorised into:
As an example
Content biases:
They are direct biases. Performing a certain ritual (i.e breaking a coconut) leads to success in an enterprise(bountiful crop). So, performing the same ritual will lead to a healthy child.
Context biases:
They are indirect biases.
Prestige/Success/Skill biases
A new PhD candidate joins a department and is aiming for tenure. She tries to assess her seniors to figure out whom to learn from to achieve her goal of getting tenure. Starting to collect this information at the lowest cost possible. For Prestige, she will look and observe how people act toward one another. If she wants more accurate information she will pull up everyone’s curricula vitae and count their publications (and divide by their ‘‘years since PhD.’’). This would give a measure or cue of Success.
Finally, if she wants more accurate information she will read papers of all those rank the highest in prestige and success. This would give her a measure of Skill. Aggregating all these measures, she’d have a quite accurate understanding of whom to start imitating( example from Joseph Henrich’s book).
Conformity Biases
Informational conformity. It is people actually altering their private opinions and beliefs about something.
Normative conformity. It is conformity for the purposes of going along with the group, to avoid appearing deviant. Under this type of conformity, people alter their superficial behaviour but often don’t change their underlying opinions or beliefs.
Examples:
8 out of 10 people at Takshashila Institution use Macbooks . A newcomer joins the organisation, he sees and talks to everyone and is now convinced that Macbooks have a performance advantage over others. So, he buys a Macbook. This is Informational conformity.
The same situation but the newcomer is not convinced that Macbooks have an advantage over others. He still buys a Macbook because he doesn’t want to appear deviant from the others and others will mock him if he doesn’t get one. This is Normative conformity.
Read More:
https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Why_Humans_Cooperate.html?id=xvZyCySHYc8C&redir_esc=y
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/Teachers/information.html
In other news, we at Takshashila Institution are exploring this unique intersection of Biology and Policy.
We are also conducting a survey "Heritable Gene Editing: Views of India". The purpose of this survey is to gain an understanding of Indians' perception of gene editing in unborn babies/embryos. Here, we are talking about gene editing that can be passed from one generation to another and could this influence the traits of future generations. The survey will give us insights and thus help in recommending policies for gene editing in India. Do fill the survey in the link given below.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QTSKQ6Q