Following the Crowd Experiment
This article references an experiment on majority-biased transmission conducted by psychologists at the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and Psycholinguistics. A test apparatus consisting of three colored boxes with a hole in the top of each was used. For each test, an observer (toddler, chimpanzee, or orangutan) was allowed to watch four other members of its own species interact with the boxes. (The four individuals were conditioned to behave a certain way before the test began.) The first three individuals each had a ball and one after another they dropped their ball into the same box and received a treat. The fourth individual had three balls and dropped all of them into the same box (but a box different than that of the first three individuals), receiving a treat each time. The observer was then given three balls and was allowed to interact with the boxes.
For more information about the experiment go to: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982212002631
The result was that both toddlers and chimpanzees favored placement in the box that was used by the majority. According to Dr. Haun, one of the experimenters, this makes sense because watching the others interact with the boxes “provides information to an individual that doesn’t know how to solve a problem, with no personal experience to rely on.” This is a classic example of an info-based reason to follow the crowd. In this case, none of the observers have any personal information to rely on, so they had to gather information by watching the others. Toddlers and chimpanzees seemed to believe that the majority had information that they didn’t on how to correctly interact with the boxes. Also, both toddlers and chimpanzees mostly ignored the individual that repeated their choice, showing that the observers made a conscious decision to follow the crowd rather than repeat the most frequently made decision.
*Orangutans seemed to choose boxes at random, which, according to Dr. Haun, could be due to the fact that “chimps and humans continue to live in large social groups when the grow up,” whereas “orangutans don’t.”
The article can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/science/following-the-crowd-isnt-just-for-teenagers.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C%7B%222%22%3A%22RI%3A17%22%7D&_r=0