Adversity magnifies the importance of social information in decision-making.

ABSTRACT: Decision-making theories explain animal behaviour, including human behaviour, as a response to estimations about the environment. In the case of collective behaviour, they have given quantitative predictions of how animals follow the majority option. However, they have so far failed to explain that in some species and contexts social cohesion increases when conditions become more adverse (i.e. individuals choose the majority option with higher probability when the estimated quality of all available options decreases). We have found that this failure is due to modelling simplifications that aided analysis, like low levels of stochasticity or the assumption that only one choice is the correct one. We provide a more general but simple geometric framework to describe optimal or suboptimal deci

SUBMITTER: Perez-Escudero A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5721171 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature