Collective behaviour of cognitive agents (renewal)

人类的相互作用比我们最近的灵长类动物关系以及其他脊椎动物物种要复杂得多。然而，正如动物群体一样，人类的社会性是一种适应性反应，可以理解为自然选择的产物。然而，与大多数动物物种相比，人类现在生活在一个远离这些社会反应进化的物理和社会环境中，并且继续快速变化。在整个现代历史中，新的运输和通信技术使个人接触到越来越多的潜在互动，个人可以在一些联系松散的社区，如工作场所、友谊团体和在线论坛中获得社会福利、地位和归属感。快速的变化意味着我们本能的社会反应可能不适合我们居住的群体类型，也不适合我们接收的社会信息的数量和质量。人类集体行为的潜在陷阱是众所周知的，从人群恐慌到股市崩盘。许多学者将人类决策中的认知偏差分类描述为对人类明显非理性的解释。然而，其他人认为，这种非理性不仅仅是认知局限的结果，而是源于人类进化环境与他们现在居住的环境之间的差异。绘制人类偏见的一个局限性是，这种地图用于记录在绘制地图时如何做出决策，而不是预测进一步的变化将如何影响决策。为了理解社会世界中正在发生的变化将如何反映在人类决策中，我们必须确定个人在做出决策时试图完成什么，以及他们在试图实现这些目标时利用了哪些隐含的知识和信念。侧重于个人如何使用社会信息（观察他人的所作所为或言论）来告知自己的选择和意见表达。这将扩展到研究的第一阶段，重点是在动物群体的社会信息使用。考虑人类群体的关键新奇包括两个部分：1。当前的社会环境与人类社会性演化的环境之间的巨大差异。在奖学金的第一阶段，我探讨了一些这样的差异如何可能发生在动物群体中，以及可能的后果，例如考虑在野外和实验室中不同的物理环境作为在这些环境中观察到的行为差异的解释。然而，对于人类群体来说，这些差异更加普遍，因为“野生”环境现在也发生了实质性的变化。此外，最近的发展大大改变了社会环境，而不是大多数人现在生活的物质环境。我将研究个人对社会世界的内隐信念，在不同的社会环境中形成的进化，决定了他们如何在全球互联的现代世界中对社会信息做出反应。在动物群体中，我的目标是了解个体之间的社会互动的驱动力，而在研究人类群体时，我将寻求制定改善这些互动的策略，以便使最好的集体智慧从人类群体中脱颖而出。也就是说，要确定集体行为的病理如何出现（如对错误信息的脆弱性，或大规模恐慌），以及什么干预措施可以降低这些风险。该研究计划将最终提供一个强大的人类社会行为的理解，预测社会环境变化的后果，允许在现代世界中最大限度地发挥集体智慧的策略设计。

Human interactions are substantially more complex and intensive than our nearest primate relations, as well as other vertebrate species. Nonetheless, as in animal groups human sociality is an adaptive response and can be understood as the product of natural selection. However, more than most animal species, humans now live in a physical and social environment far removed from that in which these social responses evolved, and one that continues to change rapidly. Novel transport and communications technologies exposed individuals to an ever-increasing number of potential interactions throughout modern history, and individuals can obtain social benefits, status and belonging in a number of loosely connected communities, such as their workplace, friendship groups and online forums. The rapid pace of change means that our instinctive social responses may now be unsuitable for the types of groups we inhabit, and for the quantity and quality of social information that we receive. The potential pitfalls of human collective behaviour are well established, ranging from crowd panics to stock market crashes. Many scholars have described taxonomies of cognitive biases in human decision-making as explanations for apparent human irrationality. However, others have argued that such irrationality is not simply the result of cognitive limitations but stems from the divergence between the environment humans evolved in and that they now inhabit. A limitation of mapping human biases is that such a map serves to document how decisions are made at the time the map is made, rather than to predict how further changes will influence decision-making. To understand how ongoing changes in the social world will be reflected in human decision-making, we must identify what individuals are trying to accomplish when they make decisions, and what implicit knowledge and beliefs they draw on in trying to achieve those goals.This fellowship extension will develop a first-principles theory of human social interaction, focused on how individuals use social information (observing what others have done or said) to inform their own choices and expression of opinions. This will extend on the research in the first stage of the fellowship that focused on social information use in animal groups. The key novelty in considering human groups consists in two parts:1. The large discrepancy between the present social environment and that which human sociality evolved. In the first stage of the fellowship I explored how some such discrepancies might occur in animal groups, and the likely consequences, considering for example different physical environments in the wild and in the laboratory as an explanation for observed behaviour differences in these contexts. However, for human groups these differences are more pervasive, since the 'wild' environment is now also substantially changed. Moreover, recent developements have substantially altered the social environment, rather than the physical environment, in which most people now live. I will investigate how individuals' implicit beliefs about the social world, shaped by evolution within a different social environment, determine how they react to social information in the modern world of global interconnectivity.2. Whereas in animal groups the goal was to understand what drives social interactions between individuals, in studying human groups I will seek to develop strategies for improving these interactions so as to enable the best of collective intelligence to emerge from human groups. That is, to identify how pathologies of collective behaviour emerge (such as vulnerability to misinformation, or mass panics) and what interventions can reduce these risks.This research program will ultimately deliver a robust understanding of human social behaviour that predicts the consequences of changes to the social environment, allowing the design of strategies for maximising collective wisdom in the modern world.