Consensus decision making in human crowds

Dyer, John R.G.; Ioannou, Christos C.; Morrell, Lesley J.; Croft, Darren P.; Couzin, Iain D.; Waters, Dean A.; Krause, Jens

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.05.010

Cited by 160 publications

(118 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…This, of course, does not preclude the possibility that bonded species such as humans might use simple heuristics to solve coordination tasks when the task demands are simple [39,40]. However, our analysis does raise the question as to why some species choose simple coordination methods associated with panmictic structure, while others resort to using more complex and costly cognition.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 62%

Processing power limits social group size: computational evidence for the cognitive costs of sociality

Dávid-Barrett

Dunbar

2013

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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ResearchCite this article: Dávid-Barrett T, Dunbar RIM. Sociality is primarily a coordination problem. However, the social (or communication) complexity hypothesis suggests that the kinds of information that can be acquired and processed may limit the size and/or complexity of social groups that a species can maintain. We use an agent-based model to test the hypothesis that the complexity of information processed influences the computational demands involved. We show that successive increases in the kinds of information processed allow organisms to break through the glass ceilings that otherwise limit the size of social groups: larger groups can only be achieved at the cost of more sophisticated kinds of information processing that are disadvantageous when optimal group size is small. These results simultaneously support both the social brain and the social complexity hypotheses.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 62%

Processing power limits social group size: computational evidence for the cognitive costs of sociality

Dávid-Barrett

Dunbar

2013

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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“…This behavior is called herding and in addition to pedestrian crowds, herding behavior is common among animals (e.g., Couzin et al, 2005). Studies by Dyer et al (2008Dyer et al ( , 2009 show that the characteristics of herding are similar between people and animals.…”

Section: Human Behavior In Crowdsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patient and impatient pedestrians in a spatial game for egress congestion

et al. 2013

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In Today's built environment, it is common that large numbers of people gather in buildings. Also evacuations of such large crowds take place frequently all over the world. Standard safety requirements for buildings cannot always ensure safe evacuation of people in such situations, and thus, computational evacuation simulations have become a common practice in building design. The currently available simulation models are able to produce quite realistic movement and egress flows. However, there has not been much focus on modeling evacuees' behavior and decision making, which may significantly affect the outcome of evacuations.This thesis develops new modeling methods to describe the behavior of pedestrians in evacuation situations. The developed models are implemented in a state-of-the-art simulation software that combines evacuation simulation with fire simulation. The models apply game theory, which is the mathematical framework for describing strategic interaction between individuals.A novel game theoretic model for occupants' exit route selection is proposed. It describes how evacuees react to the surroundings and other evacuees' actions when deciding which exit to use. Another presented model uses spatial game theory to describe pedestrian behavior and interaction in threatening and congested situations at egress route bottlenecks. The model shows that reasonable behavior by pedestrians may lead to pushing and slow down the egress flow. In addition, a new physical approach for modeling pedestrian counterflow is given.The thesis also gives the results of an experimental study on pedestrian behavior and decision making in evacuations. It is observed that, even in simple experimental settings, people are often unable to select the fastest egress route. Another interesting finding is that the participants' attempts to cooperate may lead to slower evacuation.The developed models enable building more realistic tools for evacuation simulation, which help to better assess the safety of different venues. Also, the game theoretic models improve the understanding of how crowd-level movement and phenomena emerge from the behavior and decisions of individual crowd members. The experimental results presented in the thesis provide new insights into human behavior in evacuation situations. The results of the experiments can also be used to validate computational simulation models.Keywords evacuation, simulation, game theory, experiment, crowd, behavior Tiivistelmä Nykyään on yleistä, että suuria ihmismääriä joudutaan evakuoimaan rakennuksista. Pelkkä rakennusmääräysten noudattaminen ei aina takaa evakuoinnin turvallisuutta, joten evakuoinnin tietokonesimulaatiot ovat yleistyneet rakennusten suunnittelussa. Olemassa olevat simulaatiomallit kuvaavat ihmisjoukkojen liikkumista varsin realistisesti. Sen sijaan ihmisten käyttäytymisen ja päätöksenteon mallinnus ei ole yhtä kehittynyttä, huolimatta näiden tekijöiden merkittävästä vaikutuksesta evakuointien lopputuloksiin.Väitöskirjassa kehitetään menetelmiä evakuoitavien...

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“…Self-organised biological processes are fundamentally distributed and do not require any global overview or central control. It has thus long been assumed that group members are interchangeable, following the same set of local behavioural rules and contributing equally to the collective process (Conradt and Roper, 2005;Dyer et al, 2008). This view was particularly widespread in studies on insect societies, where collective complexity and flexibility were often juxtaposed with individual simplicity and homogeneity (Deneubourg and Goss, 1989;Deneubourg, 1995;Bonabeau et al, 1997;Detrain and Deneubourg, 2002;Theraulaz et al, 2003;Detrain and Deneubourg, 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledgeable individuals lead collective decisions in ants

Stroeymeyt

Franks

Giurfa

2011

Journal of Experimental Biology

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SUMMARYSelf-organisation underlies many collective processes in large animal groups, where coordinated patterns and activities emerge at the group level from local interactions among its members. Although the importance of key individuals acting as effective leaders has recently been recognised in certain collective processes, it is widely believed that self-organised decisions are evenly shared among all or a subset of individuals acting as decision-makers, unless there are significant conflicts of interests among group members. Here, we show that certain individuals are disproportionately influential in self-organised decisions in a system where all individuals share the same interests: nest site selection by the ant Temnothorax albipennis. Workers that visited a good available nest site prior to emigration (the familiar nest) memorised its location, and later used this memory to navigate efficiently and find that nest faster than through random exploration. Additionally, these workers relied on their private information to expedite individual decisions about the familiar nest. This conferred a bias in favour of familiar nests over novel nests during emigrations. Informed workers were shown to have a significantly greater share in both recruitment and transport to the familiar nest than naïve workers. This suggests that they were the main determinants of the collective preference for familiar nests, and thus contributed greatly to enhance collective performance. Overall, these results indicate that self-organised decisions are not always evenly shared among decision-makers, even in systems where there are no conflicts of interest. Animal groups may instead benefit from well-informed, knowledgeable individuals acting as leaders in decisions. Supplementary material available online at

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Consensus decision making in human crowds

Cited by 160 publications

References 48 publications

Processing power limits social group size: computational evidence for the cognitive costs of sociality

Processing power limits social group size: computational evidence for the cognitive costs of sociality

Patient and impatient pedestrians in a spatial game for egress congestion

Knowledgeable individuals lead collective decisions in ants

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