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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Social Context Influences On Behavior Of Carolina Chickadees, Brittany A. Coppinger
Social Context Influences On Behavior Of Carolina Chickadees, Brittany A. Coppinger
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation assesses fundamental social factors that drive variation in calling and other behaviors of experimental flocks of Carolina chickadees. Specifically, I tested how group member familiarity and group composition affected individual behavior. In addition, I performed a direct experimental test of the Social Complexity Hypothesis for Communicative Complexity, which states that groups that are more socially complex will communicate with greater signal complexity than groups that are less social complex. I consider complexity to be a combination of three factors: the number of parts in a system, the variation among the parts, and the variation in the way those …
Convergence To Consensus In Heterogeneous Groups And The Emergence Of Informal Leadership, Sergey Gavrilets, Jeremy David Auerbach, Mark Van Vugt
Convergence To Consensus In Heterogeneous Groups And The Emergence Of Informal Leadership, Sergey Gavrilets, Jeremy David Auerbach, Mark Van Vugt
Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
When group cohesion is essential, groups must have efficient strategies in place for consensus decisionmaking. Recent theoretical work suggests that shared decision-making is often the most efficient way for dealing with both information uncertainty and individual variation in preferences. However, some animal and most human groups make collective decisions through particular individuals, leaders, that have a disproportionate influence on group decision-making. To address this discrepancy between theory and data, we study a simple, but general, model that explicitly focuses on the dynamics of consensus building in groups composed by individuals who are heterogeneous in preferences, certain personality traits (agreeability and …
Mechanisms For Social Influence, Jeremy David Auerbach
Mechanisms For Social Influence, Jeremy David Auerbach
Masters Theses
Throughout the thesis, I study mathematical models that can help explain the dependency of social phenomena in animals and humans on individual traits. The first chapter investigates consensus building in human groups through communication of individual preferences for a course of action. Individuals share and modify these preferences through speaker listener interactions. Personality traits, reputations, and social networks structures effect these modifications and eventually the group will reach a consensus. If there is variation in personality traits, the time to reach consensus is delayed. Reputation models are introduced and explored, finding that those who can best estimate the average initial …