Conformist social learning leads to self-organised prevention against adverse bias in risky decision making.

ABSTRACT: Given the ubiquity of potentially adverse behavioural bias owing to myopic trial-and-error learning, it seems paradoxical that improvements in decision-making performance through conformist social learning, a process widely considered to be bias amplification, still prevail in animal collective behaviour. Here we show, through model analyses and large-scale interactive behavioural experiments with 585 human subjects, that conformist influence can indeed promote favourable risk taking in repeated experience-based decision making, even though many individuals are systematically biased towards adverse risk aversion. Although strong positive feedback conferred by copying the majority's behaviour could result in unfavourable informational cascades, our differential equation model of collective

SUBMITTER: Toyokawa W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9090329 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature