Learning Aspects of Hunting Via a Conformist Bias Could Promote Optimal Foraging in Lowland Nicaragua

Given the complexity of human foraging strategies, especially hunting, recent attention has focused on the ways in which hunters acquire needed knowledge and skills, including via social learning. One potentially useful heuristic is a “conformist bias,” in which individuals identify and adopt the most common beliefs or strategies, but the usefulness of this heuristic depends on the accuracy of the information. In this study, 45 indigenous Mayangna and Miskito informants in Nicaragua were asked to rank 17 game species on the extent to which harvests of these species are associated with the use of hunting dogs. Consensus analysis indicates that there is high agreement on the rankings, and the aggregated rankings closely reflect harvest data from a yearlong study that documented the use of dogs and other hunting accessories (e.g., firearms). There were noteworthy outliers in the analysis, however, and a possible explanation is that informants are inferring that dogs are useful for some species because they are valuable for hunting perceptually similar species, as revealed by pile sort data. In addition, the consensus analysis reveals sex-related subgroup agreement in the rankings, but the aggregated rankings of neither men nor women seem to more closely correspond to the harvest data. Overall, these results suggest that a conformist learning bias could allow novice hunters to acquire information that would promote optimizing hunting strategies.