Social Learning in a Human Society: An Experimental Study

Abstract: 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. We fit a social learning model that mimics the interactions between participants of the psychology experiment. Misinformation propagation (also known as data incest) within the society under study is further investigated in this paper.