RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Adversity magnifies the importance of social information in decision-making JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 061630 DO 10.1101/061630 A1 Alfonso Perez-Escudero A1 Gonzalo G de Polavieja YR 2016 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/01/061630.abstract AB In adverse conditions, individuals follow the majority more strongly. This phenomenon is very general across social species, but explanations have been particular to the species and context, including antipredatory responses, deflection of responsibility, or increase in uncertainty. Here we show that the impact of social information in realistic decision-making typically increases with adversity, giving more weight to the choices of the majority. The conditions for this social magnification are very natural, but were absent in previous decision-making models due to extra assumptionsthat simplified mathematical analysis, like very low levels of stochasticity or the assumption that when one option is good the other one must be bad. We show that decision-making in collectives can quantitatively explain the different impact of social influence with different levels of adversity for different species and contexts, including life-threatening situations in fish and simple experiments in humans.