Washington: Ants are more rational than
humans when faced with "very challenging decisions", a study
has suggested.
Humans and animals often make irrational choices when
faced with very challenging decisions, said Stephen Pratt and
Susan Edwards, the main researchers of the study published
in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological
Sciences. This is not the case of humans being "stupider" than
ants.
"This paradoxical outcome is based on apparent
constraint: most individual ants know of only a single option,
and the colony`s collective choice self-organizes from
interactions among many poorly-informed ants," said Pratt, an
assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona
State University`s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
In the study of the process of nest selection in the
ant, Temnothorax curvispinosus, researchers at Arizona State
University and Princeton University found that in collective
decision-making the lack of individual options translated into
more accurate outcomes by minimising the chances for
individuals to make mistakes.
A "wisdom of crowds" approach emerges, Pratt was
quoted as saying in a release by the Arizona State University.
Bureau Report
