Social learning leads to inflexible strategy use in children across three societies

Human adaptability relies on our capacity to learn, either from others (socially) or by ourselves (asocially), and to update our strategy repertoire. Cognitive flexibility is the psychological mechanism that mediates strategy use. Humans excel at switching from strategies that no longer work to new ones, but when given the chance to voluntarily switch from familiar to better strategies (elective flexibility), we often exhibit remarkable difficulty. However, current research has shown that this may be mediated by exogenous factors such as cultural background and age. The present study used a four-task battery to investigate the impact of social vs. asocial information sources on the development of elective flexibility in children (ages 4 to 14) from three cultural contexts: hunter-gatherer BaYaka; horticulturalists/fisherman Bandongo; and urbanized German. Our data show that German children exhibited overall higher elective flexibility than their Congolese peers whose elective flexibility decreased with age. Interestingly, children across all communities showed less elective flexibility when they learned a strategy socially than when they acquired it themselves. The present study provides important insights on the influence of eco-cultural contexts on the development of adaptive problem-solving, and the impact of social learning on children's elective flexibility.