Decision-making in Structured Groups: from animal societies to human governance
- Submission status
- Open
- Submission deadline
Across scientific domains, collectives of agents come together to solve complex problems that one agent alone could never solve. This emergent decision making takes multiple forms, from the complex sociality of animal societies to the formal governance of human groups.
Although some patterns are shared across computational agents, animals, and humans, they are often studied in different ways across different fields: animal behaviour, cognitive ecology, social cognition, network science, cultural evolution, social ontology, political science, and economics, to name a few. These fields often use their own language and methods, such that insights from one discipline might not be directly useful to related problems in a different discipline. In this Collection, we wish to synthesize current knowledge on decision-making in structured groups and highlight recent developments in a language accessible to all researchers. Our hope is to stimulate new dialogues and translational efforts, from experimental studies to mathematical models and conceptual frameworks, to fully capture the rich diversity of ways collectives solve complex problems in nature.
Editors
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Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, PhD
University of Vermont, USA
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Elizabeth A. Hobson, PhD
University of Cincinnati, USA
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Tim Waring, PhD
University of Maine, USA
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Andrew Berdahl, PhD
University of Washington, USA
The Collection will publish original research Articles, Reviews, Perspectives and Comments (full details on content types can be found here). Papers will be published in npj Complexity as soon as they are accepted and then collected together and promoted on the Collection homepage. All Guest Edited Collections are associated with a call for papers and are managed by one or more of our Editorial Board Members and the journal's Editors.
This Collection welcomes submissions from all authors – and not by invitation only – on the condition that the manuscripts fall within the scope of the Collection and of npj Complexity more generally. See our editorial process page for more details.
All submissions are subject to the same peer review process and editorial standards as regular npj Complexity articles, including the journal’s policy on competing interests. The Guest Editors have no competing interests with the submissions, which they handle through the peer-review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Guest Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests. See our Collections guidelines for more details.
This Collection is not supported by sponsorship.
