Collective incentives reduce over-exploitation of social information in unconstrained human groups.

ABSTRACT: Collective dynamics emerge from countless individual decisions. Yet, we poorly understand the processes governing dynamically-interacting individuals in human collectives under realistic conditions. We present a naturalistic immersive-reality experiment where groups of participants searched for rewards in different environments, studying how individuals weigh personal and social information and how this shapes individual and collective outcomes. Capturing high-resolution visual-spatial data, behavioral analyses revealed individual-level gains-but group-level losses-of high social information use and spatial proximity in environments with concentrated (vs. distributed) resources. Incentivizing participants at the group (vs. individual) level facilitated adaptation to concentrated environmen

SUBMITTER: Deffner D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10973496 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature