The role of conformity in foraging when personal and social information conflict

Rachel L. Kendal, Isabelle Coolen and Kevin N. Laland

Behavioral Ecology, 2004, vol. 15, issue 2, 269-277

Abstract: There is currently considerable interest in the interplay between personal and social information in decision-making processes. Two experiments are presented exploring the relative use of prior personal information and subsequent social information in foraging decisions of guppies. Experiment 1 tested the assumption that when the use of information acquired through personal experience is not costly, conflicting social information will be ignored. The assumption was confirmed because, when given a choice between feeding at two food patches, at one of which they had previously seen conspecifics feed, individual fish with prior experience of feeding at the alternative site chose the alternative, whereas fish with no prior experience chose the site at which their conspecifics had fed. Experiment 2 tested theoretical predictions that when the use of information acquired through personal experience is potentially costly, conflicting social information will be weighed more heavily than will personal information. The prediction was confirmed because, when given a choice between feeding at two food patches, one at which they had previously seen conspecifics feed and one behind a visual barrier, individual fish with prior experience of feeding behind the barrier chose the site at which their conspecifics had fed. These findings suggest that conformity can promote social learning in naïve individuals, but prior experience can insulate individuals from conformity provided the costs of relying on that experience are small. In addition, the experiments highlight the fact that personal and social information are not always weighed equally. Copyright 2004.

Keywords: conformity; guppy; personal information; social foraging; social learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arh008 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:15:y:2004:i:2:p:269-277

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().