Animals suppress their personality for group efficiency

March 3 () –

Social animals must limit their individuality to adjust to group behavior, according to a study from the University of Bristol, published in ‘PLoS Computational Biology’.

Scientists from Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences found that group safety improved when animals paid attention to each other’s behaviours.

Their findings reveal that simple rules of social behavior can drive conforming behavior in groups, eroding consistent behavioral differences displayed by individual animals.

As explained it’s a statement Dr. Sean Rands, lead author of the study, “personality suppression may be a common strategy in group-dwelling animals and, in particular, we should tend to see the behaviors of more adventurous or timid individuals shift towards what the majority of the group is doing.”

The team modeled the behavior of a small group of animals with different tendencies to engage in risky behaviors when moving away from a safe place to live and toward a feeding ground. Next, they compared this behavior with the one they showed when they carried out the same activity in a group..

Sentient individuals in the group stayed longer in the safe space and moved more quickly to the feeding site, making the mission less dangerous.

Co-author Professor Christos Ioannou explains that “groups are often made up of individuals who are different from each other in the way they normally behave; These constant individual differences are what determine the personality of the individual.

“Experimental evidence for this comes from animals like the stickleback fish that we studied in our lab,” he says. “We can measure a fish’s personality when it is given a foraging task on its own and compare that to what happens when put in a group of mixed personalities and given the same task.”

“When faced with a social task, we found that fish tend to suppress their own behavior and instead they adapt to what the other fish in the group are doing”Add.

Dr. Rands points out that they realized that if individuals pay attention to other group members, this has an overall impact on group effectiveness, and shows that simple social behaviors can lead to the suppression of individual personalities.

“This suggests that commitment may underlie many social behaviors across the animal kingdom.“, he concludes.