Social complexity from within: how individuals experience the structure and organization of their groups

Abstract

We argue that the study of social complexity can follow two different approaches, based on how it is seen from the outside or on how it is experienced from within. Recent focus has been on the former with social complexity emerging from the interactions of group members. Here, we take the view from within and deal with the social complexity that individual group members may experience, exploring complexity arising from aspects of the social structure and social organization. We review a variety of sources of social complexity in terms of variation between and within social relationships, variation in opportunities to interact with different group members, and the role of third parties. We then examine how individuals can cope with the social complexity they face. We conclude that a refined view of social relationships at different levels is needed to study the social complexity faced by individual group members and emphasize the potential contribution of the view from within to the study of social complexity and cognition. Significance statement Animals may experience different degrees of complexity in their social groups. Instead of viewing social complexity as an emergent property of the interactions exchanged by group members, we focus on the social complexity individual group members may experience. We examine how aspects of social structure and social organization, such as the variation between and within social relationships, the variation in opportunities to interact with different group members, and the role of third parties, could create challenges and sources of complexity for individual group members. We then evaluate how emotions and cognitive abilities could be used by animals of different species to navigate the social complexity they experience and make appropriate decisions. We show that there are neglected sources of social complexity related to social relationships that derive from them changing over time and consisting of different components. We conclude by emphasizing that a change in perspective is needed to study how cognition is linked to the social complexity individual group members may experience.

Rethinking animal social complexity measures with the help of complex systems concepts

“…In both cases, these individual-level social properties are built on the history of micro interactions and relationships. When these micro-scale social relationships change, it can cause changes in social properties at higher levels of organization, such as when shifts in aggression between individuals alters the structure of a larger group-level dominance hierarchy [2].…”

“…There have been recent efforts to quantify social complexity using different scales of organization and to think explicitly about sociality from the perspective of individuals within groups [2]. Aureli and Schino proposed that group-level properties should be conceptualized as social complexity as "seen from the outside", versus more micro-level summaries at the individual level which quantifies social complexity as "experienced from within" [2]. This scale-dependent perspective is also referred to as bottom-up versus top-down [6].…”

“…Bottom-up "insider perspective" approaches attempt to determine how each individual experiences sociality or the complexity of dyadic relationships, akin to a first person point of view. Top-down "outside perspective" approaches are similar to a "bird's eye view" of sociality, and treat social complexity as more of a network property at the group level [2,6].…”

“…For animals, information is compressed when available information is filtered through the animal's perceptive or cognitive abilities or stored in a modified form in the animal's memory. For example, individuals may categorize others into clusters or sets based on matrilines while in other cases, the information on relatedness may be less compressed and more detailed if individuals need to differentiate relationships with others based on the degree of shared kinship [2]). For researchers, compression occurs any time a body of observations are summarized with a measure or statistic.…”

“…Emergent phenomena can arise from simple behavioral heuristics at the micro level, like those documented in animal movement and problem-solving studies (e.g., [65,66]). Emergent patterns can also be information-based, such as rank information contained within dominance hierarchies in many species [67][68][69]2], culturally-learned behaviors (e.g., [70,71]), or leadership in collective movements (e.g., [72,73]).…”