Couzin Fish Figure (IMAGE)
Caption
Princeton University-led researchers found that uninformed individuals -- those with no strong opinion or prior knowledge -- promote democratic consensus by diluting the power of a strongly opinionated minority that would otherwise dominate group decisions. Because uninformed individuals have no feelings on a situation's outcome, they side with and embolden the numerical majority. The researchers saw this dynamic play out with golden shiners, a strongly schooling fish. The researchers trained a large number of groups to swim toward a blue target, while smaller groups were trained to follow their natural predilection for a yellow target (right image). When placed together, the large trained group would follow the smaller group to the yellow target. When fish with no prior training (the uninformed individuals) were introduced, however, the fish increasingly swam toward the majority-preferred blue target (left image).
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(Image by Science/AAAS)
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