Meeting Abstract
In order to arrive at a behavioral decision, individuals may use information they acquire themselves through direct sampling of the environment (private information), or by monitoring the behavior of others (social information). How individuals process private and social information to assess the quality of an environment, or the resources within it is not well understood. We developed a mathematical model to understand how combining private and social information affects an individual’s assessment of their environment. In each simulation, we set the probability to successfully detect a resource (ε) constant for all individuals in that environment. This probability represents the abundance of a resource within an environment or landscape, and the true quality of that environment. Additionally, we varied the number of times an individual personally sampled the environment, the number of other individuals from which they acquire social information, and the relative weight they assign to each source of information. In each case, we examined how accurately an individual assessed environmental quality (ε) using private information alone, or a combination of both private and social information. We discuss the affect of integrating private and social information on the accuracy of an individual’s assessment of environment quality
