Experimental evidence that reputation-based partner choice facilitates information sharing in humans

A necessary prerequisite for the accumulation of beneficial knowledge, aka cumulative cultural evolution, is the sharing of information via social learning. Yet little work in the field of cultural evolution has examined the mechanisms that support information sharing in the face of exploitative information free-riding and information hoarding. We ran a series of online interactive experiments (N = 716) combined with computational reinforcement and social learning models to test whether the mechanism of reputation-based partner choice can effectively support information sharing. Participants in groups chose whether to engage in costly innovation, and whether to share the resultant knowledge. Sharers received increased reputations for sharing, and participants could use reputations to select recipients of knowledge. Study 1 found, in participants from the UK and China, high levels of information sharing but only weak partner choice. Study 2 replicated this finding with various methodological improvements. Study 3 showed that participants used partner choice to exclude non-sharing artificial bots from receiving information. Study 4 found that when partner choice was not possible, preferences for information sharing declined to comparable levels as non-sharing. Overall, our findings provide tentative positive experimental evidence that partner choice can facilitate information sharing and enable cumulative cultural evolution.