scholarly journals Aggression heuristics underlie animal dominance hierarchies and provide evidence of group-level social information

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (10) ◽  
pp. e2022912118
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Hobson ◽  
Dan Mønster ◽  
Simon DeDeo
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Dominance ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Dominance Hierarchies ◽  
Social Species ◽  
Social Information Use ◽  
Existing Data

Members of a social species need to make appropriate decisions about who, how, and when to interact with others in their group. However, it has been difficult for researchers to detect the inputs to these decisions and, in particular, how much information individuals actually have about their social context. We present a method that can serve as a social assay to quantify how patterns of aggression depend upon information about the ranks of individuals within social dominance hierarchies. Applied to existing data on aggression in 172 social groups across 85 species in 23 orders, it reveals three main patterns of rank-dependent social dominance: the downward heuristic (aggress uniformly against lower-ranked opponents), close competitors (aggress against opponents ranked slightly below self), and bullying (aggress against opponents ranked much lower than self). The majority of the groups (133 groups, 77%) follow a downward heuristic, but a significant minority (38 groups, 22%) show more complex social dominance patterns (close competitors or bullying) consistent with higher levels of social information use. These patterns are not phylogenetically constrained and different groups within the same species can use different patterns, suggesting that heuristic use may depend on context and the structuring of aggression by social information should not be considered a fixed characteristic of a species. Our approach provides opportunities to study the use of social information within and across species and the evolution of social complexity and cognition.

scholarly journals Experience shapes social information use in foraging fish

2018 ◽  
Vol 146 ◽  
pp. 63-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike M. Webster ◽  
Kevin N. Laland
Keyword(s):  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Social Information Use

scholarly journals Collective decision making by rational individuals

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (44) ◽  
pp. E10387-E10396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Mann
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Rational Decision ◽  
Rational Decision Making ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Social Information Use

The patterns and mechanisms of collective decision making in humans and animals have attracted both empirical and theoretical attention. Of particular interest has been the variety of social feedback rules and the extent to which these behavioral rules can be explained and predicted from theories of rational estimation and decision making. However, models that aim to model the full range of social information use have incorporated ad hoc departures from rational decision-making theory to explain the apparent stochasticity and variability of behavior. In this paper I develop a model of social information use and collective decision making by fully rational agents that reveals how a wide range of apparently stochastic social decision rules emerge from fundamental information asymmetries both between individuals and between the decision makers and the observer of those decisions. As well as showing that rational decision making is consistent with empirical observations of collective behavior, this model makes several testable predictions about how individuals make decisions in groups and offers a valuable perspective on how we view sources of variability in animal, and human, behavior.

Decreased environmental variability induces a bias for social information use in humans

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulf Toelch ◽  
Marjolijn J. van Delft ◽  
Matthew J. Bruce ◽  
Rogier Donders ◽  
Marius T.H. Meeus ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Variability ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Social Information Use

scholarly journals The Effect of Social Information Use without Learning on the Evolution of Social Behavior

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
James M. Borg ◽  
Alastair Channon
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Life ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Evolutionary System ◽  
Behavioral Differences ◽  
Agent Interaction ◽  
Social Information Use ◽  
Improved Performance ◽  
Foraging Task ◽  
Better Than

In a recent article by Borg and Channon it was shown that social information alone, decoupled from any within-lifetime learning, can result in improved performance on a food-foraging task compared to when social information is unavailable. Here we assess whether access to social information leads to significant behavioral differences both when access to social information leads to improved performance on the task, and when it does not: Do any behaviors resulting from social-information use, such as movement and increased agent interaction, persist even when the ability to discriminate between poisonous and non-poisonous food is no better than when social-information is unavailable? Using a neuroevolutionary artificial life simulation, we show that social-information use can lead to the emergence of behaviors that differ from when social information is unavailable, and that these behaviors act as a promoter of agent interaction. The results presented here suggest that the introduction of social information is sufficient, even when decoupled from within-lifetime learning, for the emergence of pro-social behaviors. We believe this work to be the first use of an artificial evolutionary system to explore the behavioral consequences of social-information use in the absence of within-lifetime learning.

The 3E's Approach to Social Information Use in Birds

2013 ◽  
pp. 272-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira G. Federspiel ◽  
Nicola S. Clayton ◽  
Nathan J. Emery
Keyword(s):  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Social Information Use

scholarly journals Interspecific social information use in habitat selection decisions among migrant songbirds

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 767-775 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakub Szymkowiak ◽  
Robert L. Thomson ◽  
Lechosław Kuczyński
Keyword(s):  
Habitat Selection ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Selection Decisions ◽  
Social Information Use

scholarly journals Reproductive skew affects social information use

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 182084 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Smolla ◽  
Charlotte Rosher ◽  
R. Tucker Gilman ◽  
Susanne Shultz
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Reproductive Skew ◽  
The Other ◽  
Risk Averse ◽  
Social Information Use

Individuals vary in their propensity to use social learning, the engine of cultural evolution, to acquire information about their environment. The causes of those differences, however, remain largely unclear. Using an agent-based model, we tested the hypothesis that as a result of reproductive skew differences in energetic requirements for reproduction affect the value of social information. We found that social learning is associated with lower variance in yield and is more likely to evolve in risk-averse low-skew populations than in high-skew populations. Reproductive skew may also result in sex differences in social information use, as empirical data suggest that females are often more risk-averse than males. To explore how risk may affect sex differences in learning strategies, we simulated learning in sexually reproducing populations where one sex experiences more reproductive skew than the other. When both sexes compete for the same resources, they tend to adopt extreme strategies: the sex with greater reproductive skew approaches pure individual learning and the other approaches pure social learning. These results provide insight into the conditions that promote individual and species level variation in social learning and so may affect cultural evolution.

scholarly journals Social information use in adolescents: The impact of adults, peers and household composition

PLoS ONE ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (11) ◽  
pp. e0225498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas Molleman ◽  
Patricia Kanngiesser ◽  
Wouter van den Bos
Keyword(s):  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Household Composition ◽  
Social Information Use ◽  
The Impact
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