Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior: Perspective
Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior: Perspective
Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior: Perspective
PERSPECTIVE
Stewardship of global collective behavior
Joseph B. Bak-Colemana,b,1, Mark Alfanoc,d, Wolfram Barfusse,f, Carl T. Bergstromg,
Miguel A. Centenoh, Iain D. Couzini,j,k, Jonathan F. Dongese,l, Mirta Galesicm, Andrew S. Gersickn,
Jennifer Jacqueto, Albert B. Kaom, Rachel E. Morana, Pawel Romanczukp, Daniel I. Rubensteinn,
Kaia J. Tombakq, Jay J. Van Bavelr,s, and Elke U. Webert,u
Edited by Bonnie J. McCay, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, and approved May 17, 2021 (received for
review December 14, 2020)
Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups
emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were
initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technol-
ogies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances
at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with
poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to
scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective
behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a
focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.
| |
collective behavior computational social science social media complex systems |
Collective behavior historically referred to instances in framework for understanding the mechanisms by
which groups of humans or animals exhibited coordinated which collective action emerges (3–7). It reveals how
action in the absence of an obvious leader (1–4): from large-scale “higher-order” properties of the collec-
billions of locusts, extending over hundreds of kilometers, tives feed back to influence individual behavior, which
devouring vegetation as they move onward; to schools of in turn can influence the behavior of the collective,
fish convulsing like some animate fluid while under attack and so on. Collective behavior therefore focuses on
from predators; to our own societies, characterized by cit- the study of individuals in the context of how they
ies, with buildings and streets full of color and sound, alive influence and are influenced by others, taking into ac-
with activity. The characteristic feature of all of these sys- count the causes and consequences of interindividual
tems is that social interactions among the individual or- differences in physiology, motivation, experience,
ganisms give rise to patterns and structure at higher levels goals, and other properties.
of organization, from the formation of vast mobile The multiscale interactions and feedback that un-
groups to the emergence of societies with division of derlie collective behavior are hallmarks of “complex
labor, social norms, opinions, and price dynamics. systems”—which include our brains, power grids, fi-
Over the past few decades “collective behavior” nancial markets, and the natural world (8, 9). When
has matured from a description of phenomena to a perturbed, complex systems tend to exhibit finite
a
Center for an Informed Public, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195; beScience Institute, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195;
c
Ethics & Philosophy of Technology, Delft University of Technology, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands; dInstitute of Philosophy, Australian Catholic
University, Banyo Queensland 4014, Australia; eEarth System Analysis, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Member of the Leibniz
Association, 14473 Potsdam, Germany; fTübingen AI Center, University of Tübingen, 72074 Tübingen, Germany; gDepartment of Biology,
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195; hPrinceton School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544;
i
Department of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, 78315 Radolfzell am Bodensee, Germany; jCentre for the Advanced
Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, 78464 Konstanz, Germany; kDepartment of Biology, University of Konstanz, 78464 Konstanz,
Germany; lStockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, 11419 Stockholm, Sweden; mSanta Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501; nDepartment of
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; oDepartment of Environmental Studies, New York University, New
York, NY 10012; pInstitute for Theoretical Biology, Department of Biology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, 10115 Berlin, Germany; qDepartment of
Anthropology, Hunter College of the City University of New York, New York, NY 10065; rDepartment of Psychology, New York University, New York,
NY 10003; sCenter for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY 10003; tDepartment of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
08544; and uAndlinger Center for Energy and Environment, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
Author contributions: J.B.B.-C., M.A., W.B., C.T.B., M.A.C., I.D.C., J.F.D., M.G., A.S.G., J.J., A.B.K., R.E.M., P.R., D.I.R., K.J.T., J.J.V.B., and E.U.W.
wrote the paper.
The authors declare no competing interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
1
To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: [email protected].
Published June 21, 2021.
1 E. Selous, Thought transference (or what?) in birds. Nature 129, 263 (1932).
2 Aristotle, Politics (Batoche Books, 1999).
3 M. Granovetter, The strength of weak ties. Am. J. Sociol. 78, 1360–1380 (1973).
4 H. Blumer, Social problems as collective behavior. Soc. Probl. 18, 298–306 (1971).
5 I. D. Couzin, J. Krause, Self-organization and collective behavior in vertebrates. Adv. Stud. Behav. 32, 1–75 (2003).
6 T. Walker, D. Sesko, C. Wieman, Collective behavior of optically trapped neutral atoms. Phys. Rev. Lett. 64, 408–411 (1990).
7 R. A. Bentley, M. J. O’Brien, Collective behaviour, uncertainty and environmental change. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. 373, 20140461 (2015).
8 S. A. Levin, Ecosystems and the biosphere as complex adaptive systems. Ecosystems 1, 431–436 (1998).
9 R. M. May, S. A. Levin, G. Sugihara, Complex systems: Ecology for bankers. Nature 451, 893–895 (2008).
10 M. Scheffer et al., Anticipating critical transitions. Science 338, 344–348 (2012).
11 P. J. Crutzen, W. Steffen, How long have we been in the Anthropocene era? Clim. Change 61, 251–257 (2003).
12 W. Steffen, P. J. Crutzen, J. R. McNeill. The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature. Ambio 36, 614–621 (2007).
13 A. D. Barnosky et al., Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived? Nature 471, 51–57 (2011).
14 W. Steffen et al., Trajectories of the earth system in the Anthropocene. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115, 8252–8259 (2018).
15 S. Carattini, S. Levin, A. Tavoni, Cooperation in the climate commons. Rev. Environ. Econ. Pol. 13, 227–247 (2019).
16 I. M. Otto et al., Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 2354–2365 (2020).
17 J. J.Van Bavel et al., Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response. Nat. Hum. Behav. 4, 460–471 (2020).
18 J. Zarocostas, How to fight an infodemic. Lancet 395, 676 (2020).
19 T. Hobbes, Leviathan (Penguin Books, Baltimore, MD, 1968).
20 M. E. Soulé, What is conservation biology? Bioscience 35, 727–734 (1985).
21 D. J. Watts, S. H. Strogatz, Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks. Nature 393, 440–442 (1998).
22 D. Brockmann, D. Helbing, The hidden geometry of complex, network-driven contagion phenomena. Science 342, 1337–1342 (2013).
23 A. L. Barabási, R. Albert, Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science 286, 509–512 (1999).
24 C. Schill et al., A more dynamic understanding of human behaviour for the Anthropocene. Nat. Sustain. 2, 1075–1082 (2019).
25 J. Holland, Complex adaptive systems. A New Era in Computation 121, 17–30 (1992).
26 D. V. V. Radakov, Schooling in the Ecology of Fish (John Wiley & Sons, 1973).
27 D. J. Watts, A twenty-first century science. Nature 445, 489 (2007).
28 R. Boyd, P. J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (University of Chicago Press, 1985).
29 C. Castellano, S. Fortunato, V. Loreto, Statistical physics of social dynamics. Rev. Mod. Phys. 81, 591 (2009).
30 D. Centola, M. Macy, Complex contagions and the weakness of long ties. Am. J. Sociol. 113, 702–734 (2007).
31 M. De Condorcet, Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions (Imprimerie Royale, Paris, France, 1785).
32 L. Conradt, T. J. Roper, Group decision-making in animals. Nature 421, 155 (2003).
33 R. E. Hertwig, U. E. Hoffrage, Simple Heuristics in a Social World (Oxford University Press, 2013).
34 W. Hoppitt, K. N. Laland, Social Learning: An Introduction to Mechanisms, Methods, and Models (Princeton University Press, 2013).
35 M. O. Jackson, Social and Economic Networks (Princeton University Press, 2010).
36 J. Henrich, The Secret of Our Success (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2017).
37 J. M. Hofman, A. Sharma, D. J. Watts, Prediction and explanation in social systems. Science 355, 486–488 (2017).
38 M. S. Lewis-Beck, M. Stegmaier, “Election forecasting, scientific approaches” in Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining, R. Alhajj, J. Rokne, Eds.
(Springer New York, New York, NY, 2016), pp. 1–8.
39 S. B. Rosenthal, C. R. Twomey, A. T. Hartnett, H. S. Wu, I. D. Couzin, Revealing the hidden networks of interaction in mobile animal groups allows prediction of
complex behavioral contagion. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 112, 201420068 (2015).
40 A. Strandburg-Peshkin, D. R. Farine, I. D. Couzin, M. C. Crofoot, Shared decision-making drives collective movement in wild baboons. Science 348, 1358–1361
(2015).
41 D. J. T. Sumpter, The principles of collective animal behaviour. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. Ser. B Biol. Sci. 361, 5–22 (2006).
42 I. Couzin, Collective minds. Nature 445, 715 (2007).
43 D. Sumpter, Collective Animal Behavior (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, ed. 1, 2010), vol. 1.
44 D. M. Gordon, The ecology of collective behavior in ants. Annu. Rev. Entomol. 64, 35–50 (2019).
45 S. P. Carroll et al., Applying evolutionary biology to address global challenges. Science 346, 1245993 (2014).
46 T. K. Rudel, Shocks, States, and Sustainability: The Origins of Radical Environmental Reforms - Oxford Scholarship (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2019).
47 E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
48 J. T. Stock, Are humans still evolving? Technological advances and unique biological characteristics allow us to adapt to environmental stress. Has this stopped
genetic evolution? EMBO Rep. 9 (suppl. 1), 51–54 (2008).
49 P. Turchin, T. E. Currie, E. A. L. Turner, S. Gavrilets, War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 110, 16384–
16389 (2013).
50 H. J. Zahid, E. Robinson, R. L. Kelly, Agriculture, population growth, and statistical analysis of the radiocarbon record. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 113, 931–935
(2016).
51 J. Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York,
NY, 2020), vol. 1.
52 K. Sterelny, From hominins to humans: How sapiens became behaviourally modern. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. Ser. B Biol. Sci. 366, 809–822 (2011).
53 P. J. Boczkowski, The mutual shaping of technology and society in videotex newspapers: Beyond the diffusion and social shaping perspectives. Inf. Soc. 20, 255–
267 (2004).
54 M. W. Moffett, Supercolonies of billions in an invasive ant: What is a society? Behav. Ecol. 23, 925–933 (2012).