Cultural evolution in more than two dimensions: Distinguishing social learning biases and identifying payoff structures. A comment on Bentley et al. (2014)

Bentley et al.’s two-dimensional conceptual map is complementary to cultural evolution research that has sought to explain population-level cultural dynamics in terms of individual-level behavioral processes. Here, I qualify their scheme by arguing that different social learning biases should be treated distinctly, and that the transparency of decisions is sometimes conflated with the actual underlying payoff structure of those decisions.