Collective behaviour of cognitive agents (renewal)

Human interactions are substantially more complex and intensive than our nearest primate relations, as well as other vertebrate species. Nonetheless, as in animal groups human sociality is an adaptive response and can be understood as the product of natural selection. However, more than most animal species, humans now live in a physical and social environment far removed from that in which these social responses evolved, and one that continues to change rapidly. Novel transport and communications technologies exposed individuals to an ever-increasing number of potential interactions throughout modern history, and individuals can obtain social benefits, status and belonging in a number of loosely connected communities, such as their workplace, friendship groups and online forums. The rapid pace of change means that our instinctive social responses may now be unsuitable for the types of groups we inhabit, and for the quantity and quality of social information that we receive.

The potential pitfalls of human collective behaviour are well established, ranging from crowd panics to stock market crashes. Many scholars have described taxonomies of cognitive biases in human decision-making as explanations for apparent human irrationality. However, others have argued that such irrationality is not simply the result of cognitive limitations but stems from the divergence between the environment humans evolved in and that they now inhabit. A limitation of mapping human biases is that such a map serves to document how decisions are made at the time the map is made, rather than to predict how further changes will influence decision-making. To understand how ongoing changes in the social world will be reflected in human decision-making, we must identify what individuals are trying to accomplish when they make decisions, and what implicit knowledge and beliefs they draw on in trying to achieve those goals.

This fellowship extension will develop a first-principles theory of human social interaction, focused on how individuals use social information (observing what others have done or said) to inform their own choices and expression of opinions. This will extend on the research in the first stage of the fellowship that focused on social information use in animal groups. The key novelty in considering human groups consists in two parts:

1. The large discrepancy between the present social environment and that which human sociality evolved. In the first stage of the fellowship I explored how some such discrepancies might occur in animal groups, and the likely consequences, considering for example different physical environments in the wild and in the laboratory as an explanation for observed behaviour differences in these contexts. However, for human groups these differences are more pervasive, since the 'wild' environment is now also substantially changed. Moreover, recent developements have substantially altered the social environment, rather than the physical environment, in which most people now live. I will investigate how individuals' implicit beliefs about the social world, shaped by evolution within a different social environment, determine how they react to social information in the modern world of global interconnectivity.

2. Whereas in animal groups the goal was to understand what drives social interactions between individuals, in studying human groups I will seek to develop strategies for improving these interactions so as to enable the best of collective intelligence to emerge from human groups. That is, to identify how pathologies of collective behaviour emerge (such as vulnerability to misinformation, or mass panics) and what interventions can reduce these risks.

This research program will ultimately deliver a robust understanding of human social behaviour that predicts the consequences of changes to the social environment, allowing the design of strategies for maximising collective wisdom in the modern world.