Cultural Transmission and Evolution of Mushroom Knowledge: Insights from Mycophobic Norway

The dataset used in this study contains trial-level data from an experiment investigating the cultural transmission of mushroom knowledge in a mycophobic population. Each row in the dataset corresponds to a single mushroom trial, representing the transmission of information about one of 24 unfamiliar mushroom species from one participant to another within a linear transmission chain. Participants were assigned to one of seven chains, each consisting of eight generations, and transmitted information in dyadic interactions. The dataset includes the following variables: Participant.ID (a unique identifier for each participant), Mushroom.ID (an identifier for each mushroom stimulus), Chain (indicating which transmission chain the participant belonged to), and Generation (ranging from 1 to 8, denoting the participant’s position in the chain). The variable Edibility.Input records the edibility category that was transmitted to the participant by the previous generation and includes three levels: “poisonous,” “edible,” and “inedible.” The variable Fact.Type indicates whether the participant received a negative, positive, or neutral contextual fact related to the mushroom. Personal.Impact denotes whether the original source of the information was described as familiar (e.g., someone from the participant’s own village) or unfamiliar (e.g., someone from a neighbouring village), capturing the model-based manipulation. The outcome variables include ER (edibility retention), which is binary and coded as 1 if the participant correctly transmitted the edibility classification they received, and 0 otherwise. Classified.Poisonous is also binary and records whether the participant classified the mushroom as poisonous, regardless of its actual or received edibility category. This variable is used to measure the emergence of conservative classification strategies over time. Post-hoc questionnaires confirmed that participants were unfamiliar with the specific mushroom species and had limited or no prior experience with wild mushroom foraging, minimizing the influence of prior knowledge. This dataset supports the analysis of content-based and model-based transmission biases, as well as the cumulative cultural evolution of both learnability and conservativity.