Effect of social information on an individual's assessment of its environment

That observed behaviours conflate information processing with resulting responses presents a challenge for understanding how social information contributes to adaptive behaviour in animals. Here, we develop a mathematical model that isolates how individuals assess their environment and use it to examine how social information impacts those assessments. We consider the influences of personal and social sampling efforts, how individuals combine these sources of information, group size, social sampling practices and types of environmental variation. Our analyses lead to predictive formulas that show that social information often improves but sometimes impairs environmental assessments and that the magnitude of improvement or diminishment increases with the extent of environmental variation. We also show that the weight an individual gives to social information affects both whether it improves or degrades its assessment as well as the size of that effect. Simulation results show that group size does not affect the influence of social information on average but does affect the variability of those influences. (c) 2021 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.