Rumour propagation and the eco-evolutionary dynamics of social information use

Information is a crucial currency for living organisms as it allows them to adjust their behaviour to environmental fluctuations. Thus, natural selection should have favoured the capacity of collecting information from different sources, including social interactions whereby individuals could quickl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Biological sciences, 2018-03, Vol.285 (1875), p.20180088-20180088
Main Authors: Suire, Alexandre, van Baalen, Minus
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cascades
Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics
Ecological monitoring
Ecology, environment
Epidemiology
Evolution
Host–parasite Interactions
Information processing
Life Sciences
Natural selection
Propagation
Rumours
Social discrimination learning
Social factors
Social Information
Social interactions
Variations
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Summary:Information is a crucial currency for living organisms as it allows them to adjust their behaviour to environmental fluctuations. Thus, natural selection should have favoured the capacity of collecting information from different sources, including social interactions whereby individuals could quickly gain reliable information. However, such conditions may also favour the gathering of potentially detrimental information, such as false or misinterpreted accounts of environmental and social phenomena such as rumours, which may spread via informational cascades. We applied ecological and evolutionary principles to investigate how the propagation of social information at a populational level affects the propensity to assimilate it, here defined as the gullibilty. Our results show that the evolution of an individual's susceptibility to assimilate information strongly depends on eco-evolutionary feedbacks, in particular when both useful and detrimental information circulate. We discuss our results regarding the different information transmission mechanisms involved with particular attention to specific cases of social learning.
ISSN:0962-8452
1471-2954
DOI:10.1098/rspb.2018.0088