A group of researchers have demonstrated that animals can be just as incapable of making good decisions as humans are. We've all heard of, been witness to, or even participated in extreme cases of social facilitation: consumer frenzy, the mob effect, panicked rushes in human crowds. You've got no idea what everyone is running from, but you're sure as hell getting the **** out of there! Well, this is in part due to what is called an "informational cascade." An individual forsakes the information they have acquired as an individual in order to conform to the decision made by the group because of how many other individuals have adopted this decision.
Informational cascades have been used to explain a variety of phenomena: stock market crashes, stampedes, and even mate choice copying. This particular study, published in the Journal of Behavioral Ecology, has demonstrated how nutmeg mannikins will make foraging decisions against their own better judgement. The birds were given a choice between two types of feeders: one was full of easily accessible, delicious millet seed, while the other had a layer of dried peas on top of the seed, making foraging slower and less efficient. The birds were initially given brief access to both types of feeders so that they would know one was better than the other. However, after watching playback videos of their own buddies preferentially eating from the slower feeder, the vast majority of individuals chose to doubt their personal experience and follow the crowd.
This would be like if you went to the Blue Wall to grab a slice of pizza, and there was one really long line in which every single person was paying with a credit card. Yet, there was another register open and no one was in that line, but you still decided to jump into the long line because that's where everyone else was standing. Lesson learned: your friends are not always smarter than you are.
Persuasive companions can be wrong: the use of misleading social information in nutmeg mannikins
- Posted by Deysha Rivera (final week, hooray!)
I definately have made decisions in my life based on what the majority of others were doing. It's interesting to know that there is other animals other than humans that do this. Has this been seen anywhere else? Is there an explanation for this adaptation?
ReplyDelete-Tricia Carlson
This article and study are very interesting. I have heard of studies like this before. I wonder if the animal thinks that they will be more successful if they are doing what the other animals are doing? I wonder what causes them to do it? It would be interesting to see if the reason they do it is the same as us humans do things like that.
ReplyDelete-Samantha Babcock
There's a certain amount of benefit one can attain from gathering information from your buddies: saving yourself valuable time and effort, saving one's own skin, etc. Adult rats are known to let younger rats try a out a novel food item to see if it's poisoned or not before eating it themselves (an actual adaptation to humans poisoning them for years and years). It's not really uncommon, but it's definitely interesting to see universal themes of behavior between different species.
ReplyDelete- Deysha Rivera
It was cool to learn the reasoning behind the "following the crowd" mentality. At some point it must have been beneficial enough to increase reproductive output and pass on to future generations. I cannot imagine how the wiring for informational cascades would be so much more beneficial however. Although, Deysha brings up an excellent example.
ReplyDeleteJess Bouchard (1)
Wow! What an interesting article! An informational cascade is an interesting concept. Do they have any ideas what makes them follow the crowd, even when they know their own experience was different?I find it intriguing how themes like that occur across species.
ReplyDelete-Emily Crete
This is really interesting. I wouldn't have thought that birds would think to themselves that it must be a better idea to follow the group and eat out of a feeder that they know to be slower from personal experience. Did the article explain how this might have evolved? Maybe it's because of the idea of strength in numbers, and the idea that if most of the other animals in your species are making the same decision, they must have found a benefit to it?
ReplyDelete-Posted by Sarah Benjamin
Yeah, Sarah. I think you hit the nail on the head. It's like putting your own experience vs. everyone else's response on a scale. If the number of individuals on the scale outweighs your own experience, then your response to the situation changes. I think my previous post answered the other questions. Thanks for all the comments.
ReplyDelete- Deysha