Nonconformity is costly because deviant behaviors fail to complement the culture.

Evidence

Second, the same environmental problems may have multiple solutions, and, consequently, the specific histories of different cultures may have led to divergent evolutionary trajectories—different solutions for the same problem. This process can maintain similarities among individuals within groups and differences between groups because individuals who deviate from the common behaviors in some dimension are worse off, because their rare behavior does not complement those of the rest of the culture. In this way, cultural variation is maintained in much the same way that natural selection maintains many different kinds of eyes in the animal kingdom. — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 100

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Echoes Boyd and Richerson’s treatment and parallels game-theoretic complementarity concepts (e.g., coordination games) the reader knows.

Related

• Cultural variation can persist without social learning through locally complementary solution sets. (similarity 0.85)
• Conformist bias evolution requires less environmental stability than social learning evolution itself. (similarity 0.80)
• Conformist transmission skews trait frequency toward the population majority beyond unbiased copying. (similarity 0.79)
• Conformist transmission biases learners toward adopting a population’s most frequent cultural traits. (similarity 0.79)
• Cultural variation between groups requires an adaptive explanation consistent with evolved psychology. (similarity 0.79)
• Local-optima logic fails where a stepwise-improvement pathway exists between variants (similarity 0.78)