Skip Navigation



Behavioral Ecology Advance Access published online on August 19, 2009
Behavioral Ecology, doi:10.1093/beheco/arp121
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Lay Summary
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
20/6/1217    most recent
arp121v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Rieucau, G.
Right arrow Articles by Giraldeau, L.-A.
PubMed
Right arrow Articles by Rieucau, G.
Right arrow Articles by Giraldeau, L.-A.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Persuasive companions can be wrong: the use of misleading social information in nutmeg mannikins

Guillaume Rieucau and Luc-Alain Giraldeau

Département des sciences biologiques, Groupe de Recherche en Écologie Comportementale et Animale, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P 8888, Succursale Centre-Ville, Montréal, Quebec, Canada H3C 3P8

Address correspondence to G. Rieucau. E-mail: rieucau.guillaume{at}courrier.uqam.ca.


  Abstract

Animals sample their surrounding environment to collect information, which can be obtained personally or by tracking the behavior of others (i.e., social information). Although social information appears to be generally advantageous, it can also be detrimental and may even conflict with personal information. We tested the effect that the strength of social information, and ultimately its persuasiveness, can have on an animal’s decision to use it or not by conducting an experiment using single nutmeg mannikins (Lonchura punctulata), which were offered a foraging choice after observation of videos of feeding or nonfeeding conspecifics. The persuasiveness of social information was amplified by increasing the number and changing the behavior of conspecifics that had previously been seen feeding at 1 of 2 feeders. In addition, we modulated the certainty of an individual’s personal information. Some birds had prior experience of a marked feeder always containing easily accessible food, whereas other birds experienced that this was only the case in half of the trials. Our results show that animals provided with sufficiently persuasive social information will tend to reduce the weight of even highly reliable personal information. This provides the first experimental evidence consistent with the propagation of informational cascades in nonhuman animals, which have been invoked to explain market crashes in economics or panic rushes in human crowds.

Key words: informational cascades, Lonchura punctulata, nutmeg mannikins, personal information, social information.

Received 26 February 2009; revised 21 July 2009; accepted 22 July 2009.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.