Group safety was improved when animals paid attention to the behaviours of each other according to research out of the School of Biological Sciences. Their findings reveal that simple social behavioural rules can drive conformity behaviour in groups, eroding consistent behavioural differences shown by individual animals.

The team modelled the behaviour of a small group of animals with differing tendencies while performing risky behaviours when travelling away from a safe home site towards a foraging site. They then compared this to their behaviour while completing the same activity in a group. They found that the group-aware individuals spent longer in the safe space and moved more quickly to the foraging spot, making the mission less dangerous.

Paper: ‘Personality variation is eroded by simple social behaviours in collective foragers’ by Sean Rands and Christos Ioannnou in PLoS Computational Biology.

Read the full news item: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2023/march/group-behaviour.html