Social rules help varied personalities work as a team, fish study shows
“Shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life that you’d like to,” the Smiths once sang. However, research suggests that may not be the case when working as a team.
Researchers have found that when animals temper their personalities because of social rules, the efficiency of a group to undertake risky missions – such as foraging for food – is boosted.
The team said the results, which were based on computer models, chimed with observations of animal behaviour.
“We see this phenomenon happening when we mix together shoals of stickleback [fish] with wildly different personalities: the very bold individuals and the very shy individuals tend to suppress what they would normally be doing when they stick with the rest of the group,” said Dr Sean Rands, the lead author of the research at the University of Bristol.
Writing in the journal PLoS Computational Biology, the researchers reported how they built a computer model to investigate the impact of social conventions and animals’ personalities on the movement of individuals within a group.
The model was based on a scenario in which a group of animals in a safe “home” set out to travel to a food foraging site some distance away.
The results revealed that when no social conventions were in place, their movements were governed by their personalities alone – in other words how bold or shy they were dictated how quickly they left home and arrived at the foraging site.
However, when social conventions were introduced, so that the individuals had to keep an eye on each other and adjust their movements accordingly, the impact of personality reduced with less variation in how quickly they reached the destination.
“[A bold individual is] still behaving as a bold individual. But when you’re doing your social thing you have to sort of behave with everybody else, and it’s behaving with everybody else that’s driving the movement that you’re making,” said Rands.
The team found where social conventions were present, the group foraged more efficiently than when individuals behaved independently, potentially explaining the behaviour seen in animals like stickleback fish.
“We find that if individuals pay attention to the other members of the group, the group will tend to remain at the safe site for longer, but then travel faster towards the foraging site,” the team wrote.
The team also noted that such social behaviour potentially reduced exposure to predation risk – making the undertaking safer.
Rands added that for many social animals, being part of a group can bring huge benefits, and these can trump the influence of personality.
“It is really just that you conform to what the group’s doing, because that’s the best thing for you to do, regardless of who you are,” he said.