Social Learning Strategies Reconcile the Relationship Between Network Structure and Collective Problem Solving

We study how different social learning strategies, composed of cognitively plausible rules that guide information search, stopping search and decision making, affect population-level performance in a collective problem-solving task. We show that different social learning strategies lead to remarkably different outcomes and demonstrate how these outcomes are affected by the communication networks agents are embedded in. We argue that understanding how communication networks affect collective performance requires taking into consideration the individual strategies used by agents. To illustrate this point we show how our findings can reconcile contradictory results in the literature on network structure and collective problem solving.