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Avoiding costly mistakes in groups: The evolution of error management in collective decision making

Individuals continuously have to balance the error costs of alternative decisions. A wealth of research has studied how single individuals navigate this, showing that individuals develop response biases to avoid the more costly error. We, however, know little about the dynamics in groups facing asym...

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Autores principales: Tump, Alan N., Wolf, Max, Romanczuk, Pawel, Kurvers, Ralf H. J. M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9432742/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35984855
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010442
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author Tump, Alan N.
Wolf, Max
Romanczuk, Pawel
Kurvers, Ralf H. J. M.
author_facet Tump, Alan N.
Wolf, Max
Romanczuk, Pawel
Kurvers, Ralf H. J. M.
author_sort Tump, Alan N.
collection PubMed
description Individuals continuously have to balance the error costs of alternative decisions. A wealth of research has studied how single individuals navigate this, showing that individuals develop response biases to avoid the more costly error. We, however, know little about the dynamics in groups facing asymmetrical error costs and when social influence amplifies either safe or risky behavior. Here, we investigate this by modeling the decision process and information flow with a drift–diffusion model extended to the social domain. In the model individuals first gather independent personal information; they then enter a social phase in which they can either decide early based on personal information, or wait for additional social information. We combined the model with an evolutionary algorithm to derive adaptive behavior. We find that under asymmetric costs, individuals in large cooperative groups do not develop response biases because such biases amplify at the collective level, triggering false information cascades. Selfish individuals, however, undermine the group’s performance for their own benefit by developing higher response biases and waiting for more information. Our results have implications for our understanding of the social dynamics in groups facing asymmetrical errors costs, such as animal groups evading predation or police officers holding a suspect at gunpoint.
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spelling pubmed-94327422022-09-01 Avoiding costly mistakes in groups: The evolution of error management in collective decision making Tump, Alan N. Wolf, Max Romanczuk, Pawel Kurvers, Ralf H. J. M. PLoS Comput Biol Research Article Individuals continuously have to balance the error costs of alternative decisions. A wealth of research has studied how single individuals navigate this, showing that individuals develop response biases to avoid the more costly error. We, however, know little about the dynamics in groups facing asymmetrical error costs and when social influence amplifies either safe or risky behavior. Here, we investigate this by modeling the decision process and information flow with a drift–diffusion model extended to the social domain. In the model individuals first gather independent personal information; they then enter a social phase in which they can either decide early based on personal information, or wait for additional social information. We combined the model with an evolutionary algorithm to derive adaptive behavior. We find that under asymmetric costs, individuals in large cooperative groups do not develop response biases because such biases amplify at the collective level, triggering false information cascades. Selfish individuals, however, undermine the group’s performance for their own benefit by developing higher response biases and waiting for more information. Our results have implications for our understanding of the social dynamics in groups facing asymmetrical errors costs, such as animal groups evading predation or police officers holding a suspect at gunpoint. Public Library of Science 2022-08-19 /pmc/articles/PMC9432742/ /pubmed/35984855 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010442 Text en © 2022 Tump et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Tump, Alan N.
Wolf, Max
Romanczuk, Pawel
Kurvers, Ralf H. J. M.
Avoiding costly mistakes in groups: The evolution of error management in collective decision making
title Avoiding costly mistakes in groups: The evolution of error management in collective decision making
title_full Avoiding costly mistakes in groups: The evolution of error management in collective decision making
title_fullStr Avoiding costly mistakes in groups: The evolution of error management in collective decision making
title_full_unstemmed Avoiding costly mistakes in groups: The evolution of error management in collective decision making
title_short Avoiding costly mistakes in groups: The evolution of error management in collective decision making
title_sort avoiding costly mistakes in groups: the evolution of error management in collective decision making
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9432742/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35984855
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010442
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