CU Boulder study: Honeybee hives suggest leaderless groups can outperform top-down groups

Does a group truly need a boss to get things done?

A new University of Colorado Boulder study is turning to honeybees to answer that question.

Published in the journal PNAS in June, CU Boulder researchers found that decentralized decision-making can match, and in some cases beat, centrally controlled systems as long as communication stays strong and the group strikes the right balance between risk-takers and cautious followers.

“We found that decentralized strategies of decision making are at least as good as centrally coordinated ones,” CU Boulder applied mathematics professor and corresponding author Zachary Kilpatrick said, who also studies decision-making in animals and humans.

Kilpatrick and colleagues from the University of Cincinnati and the University of Houston built a mathematical model based on real animal behavior, simulating bee colonies of different sizes under both good and harsh conditions, with and without a central coordinator. The two setups produced identical outcomes, a result Kilpatrick said surprised the team.

Kilpatrick said leaderless groups actually hold an edge in resilience.

The bees knock out one bee’s communication pathway while others still exist to pick up the slack, unlike a single leader whose death or removal can leave an entire group vulnerable.

Kilpatrick said the model also found that larger groups need a smaller proportion of “scout” bees willing to take risks by foraging outside the hive, since each additional scout adds progressively less new information once the colony reaches a certain size.

Kilpatrick said the same logic likely applies to human teams as well.

“If you send too many foragers out, you’re going to waste a bunch of energy for little additional benefit,” he said. “The same scaling logic may hold for human groups, where a small team may need half its members exploring while a large field needs only a handful.”

The findings could help engineers design more efficient drone swarms and neural networks, Kilpatrick said, adding that nature often provides the best blueprint for those systems.

Kilpatrick also sees a broader lesson for people.

Humans evolved to make decisions collectively in small groups, where as larger organizations tend to default to centralized hierarchies.

Still, Kilpatrick argues progress often comes from individuals who break away and explore without direction from above, with others following once that risk pays off.

Read the full article about Kilpatrick’s study from CU Boulder here.