Background/Question/Methods Social learning and conformity are important components of the evolution of culture and group identities in animals and humans. Conformity is positive frequency-biased transmission, which describes learners that preferentially adopt behaviors exhibited by the majority of demonstrators. Previous theoretical work studied the evolution of social learning and conformity when environmental states change and found that conformity evolves for a large range of environmental conditions. However, the foraging environment can affect the adaptive benefits of social learning and conformity. Conformity can cause a population to focus mainly on one resource while ignoring other available resources, which can incite intraspecific competition if the first resource is limited. A hypothesis called the skill-pool effect predicts that social foragers should augment their diets with less utilized food items when resources are limited. Thus anticonformity, or negative frequency-biased social learning, could be more advantageous than conformity when there is competition for resources. We study the evolution of social learning and frequency-biased transmission in a limited-resource environment using a replicator model of a forager population feeding on two resources. Results/Conclusions In sharp contrast to previous models, anti-conformity, rather than conformity, evolves from a population of non-conformists under most environmental conditions. Numerical simulations suggest that both social learning and conformity cause the foragers to favor one resource over the other even though the resources provide the same benefit to foragers. Resource limitation favors anti-conformity because anti-conformity forces both resources to be exploited equally. Similarly, depletion of resources selects against social learning. However, increasing social learning is adaptive when independent learning is difficult because it increases the rate at which individuals learn to find food. Consequently, in an environment with difficult-to-learn food cues, increased social learning is more likely to evolve. Surprisingly, this trend is only observed when social learning is already present in the resident phenogenotype; social learning never emerges in a population of individual learners.. Our results show that competition and consumer-resource interactions can alter the evolutionary course of social learning and transmission bias. Since there are many examples of conformity in the animal kingdom and especially in humans, future studies should explore conditions under which conformity would initially evolve in the presence of competition for resources.
