Mobility helps problem-solving systems to avoid Groupthink

Abstract

Groupthink occurs when everyone in a group starts thinking alike, as when people put unlimited faith in a leader. Avoiding this phenomenon is a ubiquitous challenge to problem-solving enterprises and typical countermeasures involve the mobility of group members. Here we use an agent-based model of imitative learning to study the influence of the mobility of the agents on the time they require to find the global maxima of NK-fitness landscapes. The agents cooperate by exchanging information on their fitness and use this information to copy the fittest agent in their influence neighborhoods, which are determined by face-to-face interaction networks. The influence neighborhoods are variable since the agents perform random walks in a two-dimensional space. We find that mobility is slightly harmful for solving easy problems, i.e. problems that do not exhibit suboptimal solutions or local maxima. For difficult problems, however, mobility can prevent the imitative search being trapped in suboptimal solutions and guarantees a better performance than the independent search for any system size.

References in corpus (23)

• Statistical mechanics of complex networks
• Statistical physics of human cooperation
• Prediction and predictability of global epidemics: the role of the airline transportation network
• Dynamics of person-to-person interactions from distributed RFID sensor networks
• High resolution dynamical mapping of social interactions with active RFID
• Activity driven modeling of time varying networks
• Effects of mobility in a population of Prisoner's Dilemma players
• Efficiency of informational transfer in regular and complex networks
• Synchronization in networks of mobile oscillators
• Social network dynamics of face-to-face interactions
• Modeling human dynamics of face-to-face interaction networks
• Disease spreading in populations of moving agents
• Effect of risk perception on epidemic spreading in temporal networks
• Velocity-enhanced Cooperation of Moving Agents playing Public Goods Games
• Tuning synchronization of integrate-and-fire oscillators through mobility
• Imitative learning as a connector of collective brains
• Spontaneous ordering against an external field in nonequilibrium systems
• The media effect in Axelrod's model explained
• Influence of network topology on cooperative problem-solving systems
• Exploring NK Fitness Landscapes Using Imitative Learning
• Impact of centrality on cooperative processes
• When more of the same is better
• Estimating the outcome of spreading processes on networks with incomplete information: a mesoscale approach

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Opinion Diversity and Social Bubbles in Adaptive Sznajd Networks
• Comfort-driven mobility produces spatial fragmentation in Axelrod's model
• Contrarian effects and echo chamber formation in opinion dynamics
• Policies for allocation of information in task-oriented groups: elitism and egalitarianism outperform welfarism
• The surprising little effectiveness of cooperative algorithms in parallel problem solving
• Topological transition in a coupled dynamic in random networks
• New Coevolution Dynamic as an Optimization Strategy in Group Problem Solving
• The Impact of Social Attractiveness on Casual Group Formation: Power-Law Group Sizes and Suppressed Percolation