When Does a Newcomer Contribute to a Better Performance? A Multi-Agent Study on Self-Organising Processes of Task Allocation

This paper describes how a work group and a newcomer mutually adapt. We study two types of simulated groups that need an extra worker, one group because a former employee had left the group and one group because of its workload. For both groups, we test three conditions, newcomers being specialists, newcomers being generalists, and a control condition with no newcomer. We hypothesise that the group that needs an extra worker because of its workload will perform the best with a newcomer being a generalist. The group that needs an extra worker because a former employee had left the group, will perform better with a specialist newcomer. We study the development of task allocation and performance, with expertise and motivation as process variables. We use two performance indicators, the performance time of the slowest agent that indicates the speed of the group and the sum of performance of all agents to indicate labour costs. Both are indicative for the potential benefit of the newcomer. Strictly spoken the results support our hypotheses although the differences between the groups with generalists and specialists are negligible. What really mattered was the possibility for a newcomer to fit in.Task Allocation, Group Processes, Psychological Theory, Small Groups, Self-Organisation

Simulating the Emergence of Task Rotation

In work groups, task rotation may decrease the negative consequences of boredom and lead to a better task performance. In this paper we use multi agent simulation to study several organisation types in which task rotation may or may not emerge. By looking at the development of expertise and motivation of the different agents and their performance as a function of self-organisation, boredom, and task rotation frequency, we describe the dynamics of task rotation. The results show that systems in which task rotation emerges perform better than systems in which the agents merely specialise in one skill. Furthermore, we found that under certain circumstances, a task that leads to a high degree of boredom was performed better than a task causing a low level of boredom.Organisation, Task Rotation, Work Groups, Psychological Theory, Multi Agent Simulation

Cannabinoid signalling in TNF-alpha induced IL-8 release

Original article can be found at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00142999 Copyright Elsevier B.V. DOI : 10.1016/j.ejphar.2006.04.015Peer reviewe

Societal background influences social learning in cooperative decision making

Humans owe their ecological success to their great capacities for social learning and cooperation: learning from others helps individuals adjust to their environment and can promote cooperation in groups. Classic and recent studies indicate that the cultural organization of societies shapes the influence of social information on decision making and suggest that collectivist values (prioritizing the group relative to the individual) increase tendencies to conform to the majority. However, it is unknown whether and how societal background impacts social learning in cooperative interactions. Here we show that social learning in cooperative decision making systematically varies across two societies. We experimentally compare people's basic propensities for social learning in samples from a collectivist (China) and an individualist society (United Kingdom; total n = 540) in a social dilemma and a coordination game. We demonstrate that Chinese participants base their cooperation decisions on information about their peers much more frequently than their British counterparts. Moreover, our results reveal remarkable societal differences in the type of peer information people consider. In contrast to the consensus view, Chinese participants tend to be substantially less majority-oriented than the British. While Chinese participants are inclined to adopt peer behavior that leads to higher payoffs, British participants tend to cooperate only if sufficiently many peers do so too. These results indicate that the basic processes underlying social transmission are not universal; rather, they vary with cultural conditions. As success-based learning is associated with selfish behavior and majority-based learning can help foster cooperation, our study suggests that in different societies social learning can play diverging roles in the emergence and maintenance of cooperation

Focus on the success of others leads to selfish behavior

It has often been argued that the spectacular cognitive capacities of humans are the result of selection for the ability to gather, process, and use information about other people. Recent studies show that humans strongly and consistently differ in what type of social information they are interested in. Although some individuals mainly attend to what the majority is doing (frequency-based learning), others focus on the success that their peers achieve with their behavior (success-based learning). Here, we show that such differences in social learning have important consequences for the outcome of social interactions. We report on a decision-making experiment in which individuals were first classified as frequency and success-based learners and subsequently grouped according to their learning strategy. When confronted with a social dilemma situation, groups of frequency-based learners cooperated considerably more than groups of success-based learners. A detailed analysis of the decision-making process reveals that these differences in cooperation are a direct result of the differences in information use. Our results show that individual differences in social learning strategies are crucial for understanding social behavior