GroupSolve

Humans live in large groups, and this is thought to have played a key role in the success of our species but group life results in a constant trade-off between group benefits resulting from coordination, cooperation and the sharing of information and increased within-group competition for resources. To increase the benefits and mitigate the costs, humans use a variety of strategies to solve collective problems. Previous research has focused independently on strategies used during dyadic interactions using ‘economic games’ such as the prisoner dilemma, or on how individuals share information within their group when faced with a collective problem. However, group living is a mixture of various problems linked to coordination, cooperation, competition and information sharing and there is no natural division between these questions. The main goal of GroupSolve is to provide a coherent and comprehensive framework to understand how humans and non-human primates differ in their group solving abilities when sharing information and exploiting resources. To develop this framework, we will conduct collective problem-solving experiments that will serve to develop and test agent based and social network diffusion models. In addition, the project also has the ambition to provide an evolutionary perspective on human cognition by using a comparative approach: similar experiments will be performed with human and non-human primates to bring insight into the shared and derived features of human group solving abilities. GroupSolve is composed of a strong interdisciplinary team of 4 lead researchers studying comparative cognition, animal behaviour, human psychology, statistical physics and complex networks and this project is a unique opportunity to share and combine complementary expertise in terms of experimental paradigms (dyadic interactions and group dynamics), study species (baboons and humans) and modelling approaches (social network and agent based).