Agents seeking long-term access to the wisdom of the crowd reduce immediate decision-making accuracy

Abstract

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWLiving in groups offers social animals the significant advantage of accessing collective wisdom and enhanced information processing, enabling more accurate decisions related to foraging, navigation, and habitat selection. Preserving group membership is crucial for sustaining access to collective wisdom, incentivising animals to prioritise group cohesion. However, when individuals encounter divergent information about the quality of various options this can create a conflict between pursuing immediate rewards and the maintenance of group membership to improve access to future payoffs. In this study I show that rational agents who seek to maximise long-term rewards will be more inclined to follow the decisions of their peers than those with short-term horizons. In doing so, they necessarily make less-rewarding decisions in the short-term, which manifests in a lower individual accuracy when choosing the better of two options. Further, I demonstrate that intuitions about collective wisdom can be misleading in groups of agents who prioritise long-term rewards, with disagreement being a better signal for the accuracy of collective choices than consensus. These results demonstrate that observed patterns of sociality should be interpreted in the context of the life history of an individual and its peers, rather than through the lens of an isolated decision.