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

Abstract

Balancing the costs of alternative decisions is a fundamental challenge for decision makers. This is especially critical in social situations, where the choices individuals face are often associated with highly asymmetric error costs---such as pedestrian groups crossing the street, police squads holding a suspect at gunpoint, or animal groups evading predation. While a broad literature has explored how individuals acting alone adapt to asymmetric error costs, little is known about how individuals in groups cope with these costs. Here we investigate adaptive decision strategies of individuals in groups facing asymmetric error costs, modeling scenarios where individuals aim to maximize group-level payoff (‘‘cooperative groups’’) or individual-level payoff (‘‘competitive groups’’). We extended the drift--diffusion model to the social domain in which individuals first gather personal information independently; they can then either wait for additional social information or decide early, thereby potentially influencing others. We combined this social drift--diffusion model with an evolutionary algorithm to derive adaptive behavior. Under asymmetric costs, small cooperative groups evolved response biases to avoid the costly error. Large cooperative groups, however, did not evolve response biases, since the danger of response biases triggering false information cascades increases with group size. We show that individuals in competitive groups face a social dilemma: They evolve higher response biases and wait for more information, thereby undermining group performance. Our results have broad implications for understanding social dynamics in situations with asymmetric costs, such as crowd panics and predator detection.

Collective decision strategies in the presence of spatio-temporal correlations

“…Moreover, while the current work focuses on temporal and spatial correlations, one could also consider social interactions as a source of correlation. One possibility would be for individuals to observe others who have already decided and experience a drift toward them (Tump et al, 2020(Tump et al, , 2021. Another extension would be to explicitly consider the relative value of options A and B for the individuals (e.g., Pais et al, 2013)this could be achieved via cue preferences, cue bias, or increment size.…”

The social transmission of stress in animal collectives

“…This means that an initial response by a few individuals could drive stress-mediated behavioural changes in large groups, with stress transmission potentially causing major consequences (e.g. stampedes [65]). While few individuals could promote widespread activation of the stress system, social contagion theory [66] suggests that more individuals would be necessary to buffer or block transmission.…”