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Group decision-making in animal societies
- Sociology
- 2010
Individuals need to coordinate their activities to benefit from group living. Thus group decisions are essential for societies, especially if group members cooperate with each other. Models show that…
Decision accuracy in complex environments is often maximized by small group sizes
- Environmental ScienceProceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- 2014
It is revealed that, counterintuitively, it is the noise inherent in these small groups that enhances their accuracy, allowing individuals in such groups to avoid the detrimental effects of correlated information while exploiting the benefits of collective decision-making.
Both information and social cohesion determine collective decisions in animal groups
- PsychologyProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- 2013
It is demonstrated how multiple informational dimensions are integrated within groups to achieve consensus, even though no individual is explicitly aware of or has a unique preference for, the consensus option.
Decision-making in pigeon flocks: a democratic view of leadership
- PsychologyJournal of Experimental Biology
- 2012
It is suggested that as in human groups, starting from a central position is more effective as it allows leaders to not only transmit their own information but also to average the tendencies of the other group members.
Information Certainty Determines Social and Private Information Use in Ants
- EconomicsScientific Reports
- 2017
It is shown that in house-hunting ant colonies, individuals fine-tune the parameters of their quorum responses depending on their private knowledge: informed ants evaluating a familiar new nest rely relatively more on social than private information when the certainty of their private information is low, and vice versa.
Self-Improvement for Team-Players: The Effects of Individual Effort on Aggregated Group Information
- EconomicsPloS one
- 2010
A model where group members are able to improve their personal likelihood of making a correct decision by conducting some level of (costly) effort is developed, demonstrating that there is an evolutionarily stable level of effort for all the individuals within the group, and the effort made by an individual should decrease with increasing group size.
Dynamic choices are most accurate in small groups
- EconomicsTheoretical Ecology
- 2017
It is suggested that re-evaluation dynamics can make small and very large groups optimal, and features that may be seen as limitations, like an influence from only a small number of individuals, may turn to be beneficial when considering local animal interactions.
Collective Learning and Optimal Consensus Decisions in Social Animal Groups
- PsychologyPLoS Comput. Biol.
- 2014
How learning as part of a collective results in behavior that is fundamentally different from that learned in isolation, allowing grouping organisms to spontaneously detect correlations between group members' observations of environmental cues, adjust strategy as a function of changing group size, and achieve a decision accuracy that is very close to that which is provably optimal, regardless of environmental contingencies.
Optimal use of simplified social information in sequential decision-making
- EconomicsJournal of the Royal Society Interface
- 2021
The results show that agents can employ highly effective social decision-making rules without requiring unrealistic cognitive capacities, and indicate likely ecological variation in the social information different animals attend to.
Quorums enable optimal pooling of independent judgements
- Computer SciencebioRxiv
- 2018
It is shown that majority voting is frequently sub-optimal, and can be optimally replaced by quorum decision-making, which helps explain the prevalence of quorum-sensing in even the simplest collective systems, such as bacterial communities.
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