Ants more rational than humans

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