Personality in a group living species : social information, collective movements and social decision-making

Animals need to make constant decisions throughout their lives and to make optimal decisions individuals rely on information. Information can be obtained in two distinct ways: personal or social information. The current paradigm in the information theory use in animal ecology assumes that the decision between using either personal or social information is entirely flexible and context dependent. However, the potential link between variation in personality and information use has received little attention. In this thesis I studied the effect of personality on the use of personal and social information in barnacle geese. I show that individual barnacle geese differ consistently in boldness and that boldness affects the type of information individuals use in various different contexts: In a maze solving task, a producer scrounger game and a public information experiment I found that bold individuals use less social information compared to shy individuals, providing strong evidence that the type of information individuals prefer to use depends on their boldness level. To study the ultimate causes of variation in boldness and the relationship between boldness and social information use I used an experimental and theoretical approach. In a producer scrounger experiment I tested whether the rare personality type outperformed the common personality type which could lead by means of negative frequency dependent selection to the maintenance of variation in boldness. Parallel to that I used a genetic algorithms approach to study the co-evolution of boldness and foraging tactic use in a producer scrounger game. The experimental results as well as the genetic algorithms provided no evidence for a role of negative frequency dependent selection for the maintenance of variation in boldness. Rather, our simulations suggest that differences in selection pressures in space or time (i.e., fluctuating environments) in a social foraging game may cause variation in boldness levels between populations. In our simulations bold individuals evolved to play both producer and scrounger, whereas shy individuals remained confined to scrounging, suggesting that shy individuals have difficulties when they have to collect personal information and that this might be the explanation for the increased tendency of shy individuals to use social information. I experimentally confirmed these model predictions in an experiment in which I forced individuals in either a producer or a scrounger role. Therefore, I argue that the value of social information is higher for shy individuals as compared to bold individuals since it is more costly for shy individuals to collect personal information. This thesis challenges the current paradigm that the decision between using either personal or social information is entirely context dependent. Rather, I provide evidence that personality affects the trade off between using personal and social information. </p

Crowd control: Reducing individual estimation bias by sharing biased social information

Cognitive biases are widespread in humans and animals alike, and can sometimes be reinforced by social interactions. One prime bias in judgment and decision-making is the human tendency to underestimate large quantities. Previous research on social influence in estimation tasks has generally focused on the impact of single estimates on individual and collective accuracy, showing that randomly sharing estimates does not reduce the underestimation bias. Here, we test a method of social information sharing that exploits the known relationship between the true value and the level of underestimation, and study if it can counteract the underestimation bias. We performed estimation experiments in which participants had to estimate a series of quantities twice, before and after receiving estimates from one or several group members. Our purpose was threefold: to study (i) whether restructuring the sharing of social information can reduce the underestimation bias, (ii) how the number of estimates received affects the sensitivity to social influence and estimation accuracy, and (iii) the mechanisms underlying the integration of multiple estimates. Our restructuring of social interactions successfully countered the underestimation bias. Moreover, we find that sharing more than one estimate also reduces the underestimation bias. Underlying our results are a human tendency to herd, to trust larger estimates than one’s own more than smaller estimates, and to follow disparate social information less. Using a computational modeling approach, we demonstrate that these effects are indeed key to explain the experimental results. Overall, our results show that existing knowledge on biases can be used to dampen their negative effects and boost judgment accuracy, paving the way for combating other cognitive biases threatening collective systems

The Playground Game:: Inquiry‐Based Learning About Research Methods and Statistics

The Playground Game is a web-based game that was developed for teaching research methods and statistics to nursing and social sciences students in higher education and vocational training. The complexity and abstract nature of research methods and statistics poses many challenges for students. The Playground Game aims to address this issue and bridge the gap between theory and practice by providing students with a playful practical problem case that they have to analyse and evaluate: the player’s task is to make substantiated judgements about a study that was carried out to decide upon the most suitable location for laying out a children’s playground in a fictitious town. This paper reports about the evaluation of the Playground Game among 103 students of the bachelor psychology programme from Leuven University. A pre-questionnaire preceding the game was used to collect information about the students´ individual characteristics and included a self-assessment. A post-questionnaire collected the students´ appreciations and comments, and included the same self-assessment as well as five additional test questions. This set-up allowed us to not only collect the players’ judgements and appreciations about the game, but also to assess achieved learning gains. All student activities were carried out online. As an additional step we have set up a quasi-experiment for exploring to what extent score mechanisms and audio cueing could be used for influencing (reducing) the players’ trial-and-error behaviours. The students were randomly distributed over 4 groups each of which was linked to a different version of the game. We implemented two different game score mechanisms and either used short audio cues indicating a correct or incorrect decision, or omitted these. Technically the Playground Game was implemented on the EMERGO platform, which is an open source educational gaming platform developed by the Open University of the Netherlands (www.emergo.cc). The game (so far only a Dutch language version is available) is an outcome of the CHERMUG project (Continuing and Higher Education in Research Methods Using Games), which was sponsored by the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Commission