The development of risk behaviors and their cultural transmission

We use cultural evolutionary models to examine how individual experiences and culturally-inherited information jointly shape risk-taking behavior under environmental uncertainty. We find that learning processes not only generate considerable variation in risk beliefs and behaviors, but also that conservative learning strategies – emphasizing the preservation of generational knowledge – excel in high-risk settings, promoting risk avoidance and long-term survival but limiting growth when conditions improve. In contrast, exploratory learning strategies – leveraging juvenile exploration and peer influence – foster risk-tolerant behaviors that thrive in affluent, low-risk settings where wealth buffers and social safety nets reduce the costs of miscalculations. Introducing economic stratification to the model reveals how wealth disparities and inter-class interactions reinforce these patterns, exacerbating differences in learning strategies and risk-taking behaviors within populations, and perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities through the cultural inertia of excessive risk avoidance. By uniting developmental, social, and evolutionary perspectives, our framework provides a novel lens on the cultural evolution of risk-taking behavior and its broader societal implications.