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Poster C148 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Social dynamics modulate conformity during patch foraging
Chetan Kandpal1 (), Arjun Ramakrishnan1; 1IIT Kanpur
Cooperation enables humans and animals to achieve challenging goals together, such as teaming up during hunting to capture larger prey. These successes may have driven the evolution of conformity and social learning of group norms. One could conform only to the extent that the information benefits them, called informational conformity, or they could go beyond that out of desire to fit in the group, referred to as normative compliance. The extent of conformity may vary based on the activity, expertise, and reward structure. For instance, in evolutionarily relevant tasks like foraging, where individuals demonstrate optimal behavior, informational conformity may prevail, as individuals may prioritize what benefits them over fitting in with the group. However, whether this holds true is unclear and forms the basis for this study. While most of the lab-based foraging experiments focus on individual behavior, this study seeks to investigate how the presence of virtual agents impact patch foraging. While foraging solo resulted in near-optimal behavior, as predicted by the Marginal Value Theorem. However, when social cues came into play, individuals deviated from optimal decisions, demonstrating normative conformity. When the reward structure induced competition, normative foraging was reduced. We then developed a hierarchical Gaussian filter to understand the mechanisms underlying changes in normative conformity.
Keywords: social cognition foraging hierarchical gaussian filtering conformity