Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation

Abstract

We develop a conceptual framework for studying collective adaptation in complex socio-cognitive systems, driven by dynamic interactions of social integration strategies, social environments and problem structures. Going beyond searching for ‘intelligent’ collectives, we integrate research from different disciplines and outline modelling approaches that can be used to begin answering questions such as why collectives sometimes fail to reach seemingly obvious solutions, how they change their strategies and network structures in response to different problems and how we can anticipate and perhaps change future harmful societal trajectories. We discuss the importance of considering path dependence, lack of optimization and collective myopia to understand the sometimes counterintuitive outcomes of collective adaptation. We call for a transdisciplinary, quantitative and societally useful social science that can help us to understand our rapidly changing and ever more complex societies, avoid collective disasters and reach the full potential of our ability to organize in adaptive collectives.

Collective incentives reduce over-exploitation of social information in unconstrained human groups

“…We designed a 3D immersive-reality collective foraging paradigm to obtain fine-grained visual and spatial data from interacting groups and developed computational Social Hidden Markov Decision models to extract and understand strategic choices from naturalistic behavior. Collective foraging provides an ideal testbed to study social decision-making and collective adaptation in a controlled, yet ecologically relevant, context 1 , 34 . Anthropologists have identified our unique abilities to collectively find and extract high-quality resources from diverse environments as a defining feature of human adaptability 35 – 38 .…”

“…Collective behavior emerges from individual-level cognition, and the cognitive mechanisms driving social interactions strongly determine whether social influence promotes adaptive behavior or leads to maladaptive herding 1 , 2 . Despite their crucial role in governing the outcomes of collective behaviors, the decision-making processes of human collectives under naturalistic conditions remain poorly understood 3 , 4 .…”

Editorial: Understanding and engineering cyber-physical collectives

“…Another aspect that emerges is the variety of methodologies and approaches in use, ranging across formal, algorithmic, and more practical, engineering-oriented solutions. Despite difficulties and differences, the research clearly shows the importance of considering a collective dimension in the engineering of socio-technical systems ( Abowd, 2016 ; Casadei, 2023a ; Galesic et al, 2023 ), as a key complement to the traditional viewpoints and especially to the classical workflow of individually-engineered entities integrated together as a second step. Indeed, considering sets of devices as collectives enables the use of qualitatively different tools, e.g., macro-level abstractions and models.…”

“…A crucial aspect of macro-systems is also their efficient deployment on heterogeneous infrastructures across the edge-cloud continuum ( Casadei et al, 2022 ; Júnior et al, 2022 ). Another key theme is the integration of artificial collective systems with humans, leading to notions like human-in-the-loop cyber-physical systems ( Annaswamy et al, 2023 ), social machines ( Hendler and Berners-Lee, 2010 ), and complex socio-cognitive systems ( Galesic et al, 2023 ). Last but not least, given CPCs are quite peculiar systems due to their complexity, they come with new challenges and opportunities regarding digital twins ( Casadei et al, 2021 ), security and privacy ( Aldini, 2018 ), and green computing ( Stolfi and Alba, 2018 ).…”

Minority-group incubators and majority-group reservoirs support the diffusion of climate change adaptations

“…We define an adaptation as a solution to a problem that confers a greater fitness to those who employ the behaviour compared to those who do not [10]. We assume that the adaptation already exists, generated through some adaptive cultural process [13].…”