Social Networks Make us Smarter: Why Human Civilizations Rise and Fall

Social networks may not just connect us to other individuals; they may also make us smarter. Scientists have discovered that the secret behind why some cultures thrive while others disappear may lie in social networks and our ability to imitate, rather than individual smarts.

In order to study how connectedness can influence people and societies, the researchers employed a series of "generations" of participants. Volunteers were asked to learn new skills, such as digital photo editing and knot tying. Then, they were asked to pass on what they learned to the next "generation" of participants. Scientists found that the groups with greater access to experts accumulated significantly more skill than those with less access to teachers. In fact, within ten "generations" of volunteers, each member of the group with multiple mentors had stronger skills than the group limited to a single mentor.

"This is the first study to demonstrate in a laboratory setting what archaeologists and evolutionary theorists have long suggested: that there is an important link between a society's sociality and the sophistication of its technology," said Michael Muthukrishna, one of the researchers, in a news release.

That's not all the scientists discovered, though. They found that the groups in the study with greater access to experts also retained their skills much longer than the groups who began with less access to mentors. This demonstrated that the groups with the experts were able to sustain higher levels of "cultural knowledge" over multiple generations.

So what does this mean exactly? The study has important implications for several areas, including skills development and education in addition to protecting endangered languages and cultural practices. These findings also reveal that when people can observe and learn from a wider range of teachers, groups can better maintain and even increase average skills over time. This reveals how some civilizations may have succeeded in the long run while others eventually disappeared from history. It turns out that social networking may be far more important than we thought.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.