Abstract
The collective behaviour of animal and human groups emerges from the individual decisions and actions of their constituent members. Recent research has revealed many ways in which the behaviour of groups can be influenced by differences amongst their constituent individuals. The existence of individual differences that have implications for collective behaviour raises important questions. How are these differences generated and maintained? Are individual differences driven by exogenous factors, or are they a response to the social dilemmas these groups face? Here I consider the classic case of patch selection by foraging agents under conditions of social competition. I introduce a multilevel model wherein the perceptual sensitivities of agents evolve in response to their foraging success or failure over repeated patch selections. This model reveals a bifurcation in the population, creating a class of agents with no perceptual sensitivity. These agents exploit the social environment to avoid the costs of accurate perception, relying on other agents to make fitness rewards insensitive to the choice of foraging patch. This provides a individual-based evolutionary basis for models incorporating perceptual limits that have been proposed to explain observed deviations from the Ideal Free Distribution (IFD) in empirical studies, while showing that the common assumption in such models that agents share identical sensory limits is likely false. Further analysis of the model shows how agents develop perceptual strategic niches in response to environmental variability. The emergence of agents insensitive to reward differences also has implications for societal resource allocation problems, including the use of financial and prediction markets as mechanisms for aggregating collective wisdom.
Highlights
Competition for resources is a major determinant of behaviour in both humans and other animals, as individuals seek resources that are both plentiful and under exploited by others
While many models of collective behaviour consider groups that are composed of identical individuals, much recent work in this field has focused on the importance of heterogeneity: differences between individuals within a group
Differences in individual motivations are an important source of variation in the behaviour of groups composed of rational agents [8], while groups with mixed evidence thresholds for decision making can make faster and more accurate decisions than those composed of identical agents, [9]
Summary
While many models of collective behaviour consider groups that are composed of identical individuals (with identical motivations and rules of behaviour), much recent work in this field has focused on the importance of heterogeneity: differences between individuals within a group. Differences in individual motivations are an important source of variation in the behaviour of groups composed of rational agents [8], while groups with mixed evidence thresholds for decision making can make faster and more accurate decisions than those composed of identical agents, [9]. Both theoretical and empirical evidence [10,11,12,13,14] has highlighted the importance of ‘noise’ in collective behaviour. This noise may result from unobserved differences between individuals that cause them to act in unpredictable ways in apparently identical situations
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