Workers of the Argentine ant,

No abstract

'any collective activities p3farmed by social insects result ial complex spatiotemporal patterns. Ethologists are often tempted to assume that such complex patterns at the colony level can be generated only by complex individuals, that is, by i~(~~vic~i~a~~ who are able to take into account nmerous parameters to moclu~ate their behaviours. Theories of sel8-o~ganlzatlon (SO) (originally developed in the context of physics and chemistry in order to describe the emergence of macroscopic patterns out of prucesses and interactiotis defined at the microscopic level',") can be extended to ethol;gical systems, particularly social insects, to show that complex collective behaviours may emerge from interactions among individuals that exhibit simple behaviours. In these cases, there is no need to invoke individual complexity.Recent research shows that SO is indeed a major component of a wide range of collective phenomena in social insects:'. But work on SO in insect societies, and more genrerally in ethology, is c&ly overlooked IaWause the emphasis of SO is on how'i collective behaviours Eric i3onabeau is at the Santa Fe Institute.

Many variations of the method are possible. The activity and affect descriptors used to describe episodes should fit the particular topic of investigation. Interactive questionnaires offer further opportunities to tailor the affect terms to the respective episode; for example, when the individual identifies an episode as an interaction with customers rather than with family members, different descriptors could be presented. Other variations could make the method more practical for adoption in conventional surveys. Our preliminary work suggests that much of the benefit of the DRM in producing accurate emotional recall could be retained if respondents are asked to retrieve specific recent episodes of a designated type (e.g., Bthe last occasion on which you went out to dinner[). When samples are large and interviewing time is scarce, the allocation of different situations to subgroups of respondents makes it possible to achieve comprehensive coverage of situations while minimizing respondent burden. In conjunction with timeuse data obtained from other sources, affect profiles of the main activities in which people engage could be integrated to produce a duration-weighted assessment of the experience of the population and of subgroups. The DRM or its variants could also contribute to the development of an accounting system for the well-being of society, a potentially important tool for social policy (32, 33).