Data from: Assortative social learning and its implications for human (and animal?) societies

Choosing from whom to learn is an important element of social learning. It
affects learner success and the profile of behaviors in the population.
Because individuals often differ in their traits and capabilities, their
benefits from different behaviors may also vary. Homophily, or assortment,
the tendency of individuals to interact with other individuals with
similar traits, is known to affect the spread of behaviors in humans. We
introduce models to study the evolution of assortative social learning
(ASL), where assorting on a trait acts as an individual-specific mechanism
for filtering relevant models from which to learn when that trait varies.
We show that when the trait is polymorphic, ASL may maintain a stable
behavioral polymorphism within a population (independently of coexistence
with individual learning in a population). We explore the evolution of ASL
when assortment is based on a nonheritable or partially heritable trait,
and when ASL competes with different non-ASL strategies: oblique (learning
from the parental generation) and vertical (learning from the parent). We
suggest that the tendency to assort may be advantageous in the context of
social learning, and that ASL might be an important concept for the
evolutionary theory of social learning.