When in Rome, should you really do as the Romans do? In episode 50, Wataru Toyokawa from the University of Konstanz in Germany discusses how observing and imitating others in crowds can at times enhance collective ‘wisdom’ … while other times it can lead to collective ‘madness.’ His article, “Social learning strategies regulate the wisdom and madness of interactive crowds” (open-access preprint here), co-authored with Andrew Whalen and Kevin N. Laland, was published on January 21, 2019, in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

 

Websites and other resources

• Wataru’s “Behind the Paper” article in Behavioural and Social Sciences at Nature Research
• Wataru on Twitter
• Study’s code and data on Github
• Wataru’s article in The Conversation on collective intelligence
• Nicky Case‘s game to better understand the wisdom and/or madness of crowds
• Video clip of the experiment

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