A PROPOSAL TO EXPLORE THE DYNAMICS OF COLLECTIVE DECISION MAKING USING SOCIAL FORAGING

Abstract

We recently developed a general mathematical framework to model the collective dynamics of a group of agents making decisions about a set of options. This theoretical approach allows us to extract the key parameters governing collective decision making, in particular, in terms of cooperation vs. competition among the agents and in terms of the resulting set of decisions (i.e., agreement, consensus, disagreement, polarization). Here, we suggest an interdisciplinary approach to collective decisions that uses a recently developed paradigm evaluating social foraging in human participants in combination with mathematical modeling. We plan to execute real-world experiments, where a group of simultaneous yet independent foragers must choose their search strategy in competitive, cooperative, or mixed scenarios. Such a feedback loop between theoretical predictions and experimental observations could lead to a quantitative theory of human behavior during real-world collective decision making and can potentially contribute novel paths to emerging areas such as computational psychology and psychopathology.