Solitary movement style predicts group foraging success but not leadership choices
Solitary movement style predicts collective foraging while whom to follow emerges only in company
Multiagent Systems
Summary
This paper explores how well a person's behavior when alone can predict their actions and success in a group searching for resources. The authors analyzed large datasets of human groups and found that individual movement patterns alone can predict how well the group will perform. However, deciding who to follow in a group only happens when people are together, and cannot be guessed from solitary behavior. This shows that some social behaviors emerge only in the company of others, limiting what can be anticipated from studying individuals in isolation.
What this means in practice
- •For team managers: Estimate team effectiveness by evaluating members' individual movement and performance patterns before group tasks.
- •For social robotics engineers: Design robots that adapt leadership dynamics only when interacting with groups, since leadership choices appear only in social settings.
Authors
Hiroshi Higashi
Abstract
How far can behaviour inside a group, and the group's performance, be predicted from members measured while alone? We tested this on three public datasets of human collective foraging (621, 128 and 1,133 participants). A low-dimensional individual representation estimated from private-phase movement was mapped onto behaviour inside the group through a mapping learned on other participants. Private information processing was stable between the two halves of a session (split-half reliability, the correlation between the halves, 0.60--0.83) and predicted behaviour inside the group with correlations of 0.30--0.66. Selective social learning, following those who have succeeded or stopped, showed stable individual differences inside the group (reliability 0.45--0.59) yet was not predicted at all from the same person's private behaviour. Group performance was predicted with a correlation of 0.55 in all three datasets by simulations never fitted to group outcomes or by the mean of individually measured performance, a prediction carried by mobility and individual performance rather than by social weights. We found no credible evidence for an effect of how members were combined (equivalence bound 0.06). Whom to follow thus emerges only in company, which delimits what solitary measurements can predict and compose.