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Cognitive mechanisms for human flocking dynamics

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Abstract

Low-level “adaptive” and higher-level “sophisticated” human reasoning processes have been proposed to play opposing roles in the emergence of unpredictable collective behaviors such as crowd panics, traffic jams, and market bubbles. While adaptive processes are widely recognized drivers of emergent social complexity, complementary theories of sophistication predict that incentives, education, and other inducements to rationality will suppress it. We show in a series of multiplayer laboratory experiments that, rather than suppressing complex social dynamics, sophisticated reasoning processes can drive them. Our experiments elicit an endogenous collective behavior and show that it is driven by the human ability to recursively anticipate the reasoning of others. We identify this behavior, “sophisticated flocking”, across three games, the Beauty Contest and the “Mod Game” and “Runway Game”. In supporting our argument, we also present evidence for mental models and social norms constraining how players express their higher-level reasoning abilities. By implicating sophisticated recursive reasoning in the kind of complex dynamic that it has been predicted to suppress, we support interdisciplinary perspectives that emergent complexity is typical of even the most intelligent populations and carefully designed social systems.

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Acknowledgements

The data are available upon request. The authors would like to thank Yuzuru Sato, Harmen De Weerd, Tatsuya Kameda, Max Kleiman-Weber, Arlington Williams, and James Walker. This work was supported in part by NSF REESE Grant 0910218; NSF/IGERT 0903495; NASA/INSGC Space Grant NNX10AK66H. This work is based on the dissertation of author SF (http://gradworks.umi.com/35/99/3599175.html). All experiments were approved by the Indiana University IRB.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, University of California, Davis, Kerr Hall 469, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Seth Frey

  2. Neukom Institute for Computational Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Seth Frey

  3. Cognitive Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Seth Frey & Robert L. Goldstone

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Correspondence to Seth Frey.

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Frey, S., Goldstone, R.L. Cognitive mechanisms for human flocking dynamics. J Comput Soc Sc 1, 349–375 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-018-0017-x

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