Consensus decision making in animals.

By L. Conradt, T. Roper. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2005

839 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Individual animals routinely face decisions that are crucial to their fitness. In social species, however, many of these decisions need to be made jointly with other group members because the group will split apart unless a consensus is reached. Here, we review empirical and theoretical studies of consensus decision making, and place them in a coherent framework. In particular, we classify consensus decisions according to the degree to which they involve conflict of interest between group members, and whether they involve either local or global communication; we ask, for different categories of consensus decision, who makes the decision, what are the underlying mechanisms, and what are the functional consequences. We conclude that consensus decision making is common in non-human animals, and that cooperation between group members in the decision-making process is likely to be the norm, even when the decision involves significant conflict of interest.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3cf42dfe991dd2171aae176e9ca1b13550146fa6

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Citations in the corpus

A rule-of-thumb based on social affiliation explains collective movements in desert baboons (2011, background): “This requires that group members organize their movements and collectively ‘agree’ on the coordination of important events such as where and when to travel, commonly referred to as a ‘consensus decision’ (Conradt & Roper 2005).”
Group movement decisions in capuchin monkeys: The utility of an experimental study and a mathematical model to explore the relationship between individual and collective behaviours (2007, background): “They are used by many species living in large societies (Conradt & Roper, 2005) with low individual levels of cognition but also by vertebrates, including primates, living in small or large groups (Parrish & Edelstein-Keshet, 1999; Hemelrijk, 2002; Couzin & Krause, 2003).”
Sociable schedules: interplay between avian seasonal and social behaviour (2006, background): “For instance, benefits of aggregation depend on the ability of animals to coordinate their schedules (Conradt & Roper 2003, 2005).”
Effect of affiliative and agonistic relationships on leadership behaviour in free-ranging dogs (2010, background): “To benefit from sociality, animals need to maintain group cohesiveness andmake collective consensus decisions about which activities to perform and when to perform them (Conradt & Roper 2000, 2003, 2005).”
Social and ecological determinants of fission-fusion dynamics in the spotted hyaena (2008, background): “Unlike animals living in cohesive social groups, individuals living in FF societies are able to make decisions without the consensus of the entire group (Conradt & Roper 2005).”
Greetings promote cooperation and reinforce social bonds among spotted hyaenas (2011, background): “Although this lifestyle permits individuals to reduce conflicts of interest (Conradt & Roper 2005), it also imposes a unique set of challenges upon group members that often experience long separations from one another (Aureli et al. 2008).”
A Low-Cost Manipulation of Food Resources Reduces Spatial Overlap Between Baboons (Papio ursinus) and Humans in Conflict (2011, background): “We could not measure accurately individual consensus costs (Conradt and Roper 2005; King et al. 2008) incurred 1402 B.”
To follow or not to follow: decision making and leadership during the morning departure in chacma baboons (2008, background): “Conradt & Roper (2005) proposed that group members can reach a decision through two different processes: ‘combined’ and ‘consensus’.”
Selective mimetism at departure in collective movements of Macaca tonkeana: an experimental and theoretical approach (2009, background): “Nevertheless, some authors (Conradt & Roper 2005; Stueckle & Zinner 2008) have opposed consensus (more complex negotiation) and combined decisions (self-organized processes).”
Coordination of Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in a Stag Hunt Game (2011, background): “So after one individual has made her decision, coordination can be achieved via 3 ways (Conradt and Roper 2005): 1) followers monitor the behavior of their group members and use social cues that are unintentionally spread, e.”
Chimpanzees coordinate in a negotiation game (2009, background): “Keywords: Chimpanzees; Cooperation; Negotiation; Food; Coordination Within all social species individuals must negotiate over such things as travel direction and activity timing if they are to avoid the costs of group fissions (see Conradt & Roper, 2005 for a review).”
Swarm cognition in honey bees (2007, background): “Similarly, consensus decision making in other species (Conradt and Roper 2005) is likely to involve group memory in the information processing by the group.”
Animal social networks: an introduction (2009, background): “Social animals can benefit from group living by combining diverse information to make consensus decisions (Conradt and Roper 2005). This area has seldom been explored in the context of social networks. Lusseau and Conradt (2009) looked for evidence of “unshared consensus decisions” among bottlenose ”
Collective cognition in animal groups. (2009, background): “Recent studies have begun to elucidate how the repeated interactions among grouping animals scale to collective behavior, and have revealed, remarkably, that collective decision-making mechanisms across a wide range of animal group types, from insects to birds (and even among humans in certain circu”
Where Next? Group Coordination and Collective Decision Making by Primates (2011, background): “However, because it is likely that individuals will have motivation to perform different activities at different times (Conradt and Roper 2005), individuals are faced with making a choice to follow certain individuals and ignore others (King 2010).”