Abstract
To build a theory of social complexity, we need to understand how aggregate social properties arise from individual interaction rules. Here, I review a body of work on the developmental dynamics of pigtailed macaque social organization and conflict management that provides insight into the mechanistic causes of multi-scale social systems. In this model system coarse-grained, statistical representations of collective dynamics are more predictive of the future state of the system than the constantly in-flux behavioural patterns at the individual level. The data suggest that individuals can perceive and use these representations for strategical decision-making. As an interaction history accumulates the coarse-grained representations consolidate. This constrains individual behaviour and provides the foundations for new levels of organization. The time-scales on which these representations change impact whether the consolidating higher-levels can be modified by individuals and collectively. The time-scales appear to be a function of the ‘coarseness’ of the representations and the character of the collective dynamics over which they are averages. The data suggest that an advantage of multiple timescales is that they allow social systems to balance tradeoffs between predictability and adaptability. I briefly discuss the implications of these findings for cognition, social niche construction and the evolution of new levels of organization in biological systems.
Highlights
The origins of social complexity have long fascinated anthropologists, sociologists and biologists [1,2,3,4,5]
One way to ground the discussion of what social complexity is and how to measure it, is to study how functionally significant aggregate properties arise from microscopic dynamics
Our analyses indicate that individuals take into account how many signals they receive in total from their population of signallers weighted by a measure of the diversity of that signalling population to estimate how much consensus there is in the group about their capacity to use force, and how much power others collectively perceive them to have
Summary
The origins of social complexity have long fascinated anthropologists, sociologists and biologists [1,2,3,4,5]. One way to ground the discussion of what social complexity is and how to measure it, is to study how functionally significant aggregate properties arise from microscopic dynamics. Such an approach can reveal the natural scales of the system and the types of structure associated with those scales [8]. This can clarify the kinds of formal complexity measures [9] that might be usefully applied to measure ordered states at different levels of social organization. The data further suggest that multiple time-scales allow social systems to balance tradeoffs between predictability and adaptability
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