Rumour propagation and the eco-evolutionary dynamics of social information use.

ABSTRACT: Information is a crucial currency for living organisms as it allows them to adjust their behaviour to environmental fluctuations. Thus, natural selection should have favoured the capacity of collecting information from different sources, including social interactions whereby individuals could quickly gain reliable information. However, such conditions may also favour the gathering of potentially detrimental information, such as false or misinterpreted accounts of environmental and social phenomena such as rumours, which may spread via informational cascades. We applied ecological and evolutionary principles to investigate how the propagation of social information at a populational level affects the propensity to assimilate it, here defined as the gullibilty. Our results show that the evolu

SUBMITTER: Suire A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5897645 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature