Is the common rule for decision making in animal collectives also applicable to human collectives?

 After studying Arganda et al.’s paper which claims  to present a common rule for decision making in animal collectives, we wondered whether their model is applicable to human collectives, particularly in case of two people; one as the focal individual and the other as the social peer. Before anything else, I was curious to see the general model prediction of the focal individual choosing ‘x’ when the social peer has already chosen option ‘x’ (n_x=1 so n_y=0) or ‘y’ (n_x=0 so n_y=1). I plotted the probability of choosing x as a function of ‘a’ and ‘s’ for three values of k (0, 0.5, 1) in each of these two cases.

As we can see, when the peer has chosen x, the dominant red colour in Fig.1 shows that the focal individual is more likely to choose ‘x’ as well, unless ‘s’ is low. If we go back to definition of ‘s’, it indicates social information, i.e. very low ‘s’ means that the individual doesn’t consider the peer’s behaviour. An interesting point to me was the independency of ‘a’ value (subjective confidence that ‘x’ is not good as we discussed) predicted by the model in this case.

The opposite behavior is predicted when the peer goes to ‘y’ site, i.e. the focal individual is not likely to choose ‘x’ unless ‘s’ is very low

Green areas, indicating no difference between two choices are narrow bars parallel to ‘a’ axis in low ‘s’ (at most s = 2) or narrow bars parallel to ‘s’ axis in low ‘a’s. These trend decreases as ‘k’ increases.

I think with this simple insertion of numbers of people, we can find an appropriate a,s and k which can explain the social decision-making behavior of an individual.

In Further steps, I’m thinking of manipulating the model to obtain a better fit. In the case of any special result, I will let you know.