The Achilles' heel hypothesis: misinformed keystone individuals impair collective learning and reduce group success.

ABSTRACT: Many animal societies rely on highly influential keystone individuals for proper functioning. When information quality is important for group success, such keystone individuals have the potential to diminish group performance if they possess inaccurate information. Here, we test whether information quality (accurate or inaccurate) influences collective outcomes when keystone individuals are the first to acquire it. We trained keystone or generic individuals to attack or avoid novel stimuli and implanted these trained individuals within groups of naive colony-mates. We subsequently tracked how quickly groups learned about their environment in situations that matched (accurate information) or mismatched (inaccurate information) the training of the trained individual. We found that colonies w

SUBMITTER: Pruitt JN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4795039 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature