Variation in personality can substitute for social feedback in coordinated animal movements

Abstract

Collective movements are essential for the effective function of animal societies, but are complicated by the need for consensus among group members. Consensus is typically assumed to arise via feedback mechanisms, but this ignores inter-individual variation in behavioural tendency (‘personality’), which is known to underpin the successful function of many complex societies. In this study, we use a theoretical approach to examine the relative importance of personality and feedback in the emergence of collective movement decisions in animal groups. Our results show that variation in personality dramatically influences collective decisions and can partially or completely replace feedback depending on the directionality of relationships among individuals. The influence of personality increases with the exaggeration of differences among individuals. While it is likely that both feedback and personality interact in nature, our findings highlight the potential importance of personality in driving collective processes.

Familiarity, age, weaning and health status impact social proximity networks in dairy calves

“…Our results indicate that age, familiarity, weaning and sickness have a significant importance in the variation of social proximity interaction of calves. However, other important factors such as differences in animal personality within a group can also drive collective behaviour and hence sociality in animals 1 , 64 . Variation in sociality can also play a role in animal personality, creating a feedback loop 1 .…”

Mechanisms of collective learning: how can animal groups improve collective performance when repeating a task?

“…There are many empirical and theoretical studies that have investigated how social roles (e.g. leader versus follower [ 79 ]), division-of-labour [ 36 , 80 , 81 ] and/or personalities [ 39 , 82 , 83 ] can spontaneously and progressively emerge within collectives, but the link to a progressive increase in collective performance through this mechanism seems to have been rarely addressed empirically [ 84 ]. In eusocial insects, for instance, while division-of-labour is ubiquitous and the current literature favours mechanisms of self-emergence within colonies, an empirical link from the progressive emergence of division-of-labour to any colony-level performance is still lacking [ 81 , 85 ].…”

The effect of idiosyncrasy on aggregation in group-living organisms

“…Over the last years, a growing research interest has emerged among the collective behaviour community, which aims to acknowledge that interindividual differences are present in a group, a community or a society (Aplin et al, 2013;Farine et al, 2015;Jolles et al, 2017;Jolles et al, 2020;Planas-Sitjà et al, 2021). These studies contrast with the traditional theoretical view where individuals are considered to be essentially identical blackboxes and where the feedbacks generated by their symmetric interactions are the most essential ingredient in the dynamics of the collective decision-making (Camazine et al, 2001;Sumpter, 2005;Sumpter, 2010).…”