A recent study finds that ants benefit from group cooperation, whereas humans do not.
On March 25, 2020, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres launched a $2 billion coordinated global humanitarian response plan, emphasizing that global cooperation was the only way to combat the COVID-19 epidemic.
While the disaster may seem behind us, its consequences for humans remain indelible. Between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2021, the total number of deaths directly or indirectly related to the COVID-19 pandemic reached approximately 14.9 million. The global economy is experiencing its worst recession since World War II and has not yet fully recovered.
Looking back, the pandemic exposed the fragility of global cooperation. Differences in interests, cognitions, and political positions among nations, organizations, and individuals led to inconsistencies in anti-pandemic measures, unequal resource distribution, and the spread of rumors and misinformation.
The varying response strategies of the World Health Organization (WHO) and national governments fragmented pandemic control efforts and caused missed opportunities for early intervention. Discrepancies in information among individuals—such as whether masks were effective or whether vaccines were safe—fostered public distrust of official advice, reducing the efficiency of cooperation.
As a result, the pandemic lasted longer, spread more widely, and led to a higher death toll. This raises a critical question:
Can humans truly benefit from cooperation, especially in the face of public crises?
A recent study provides some answers to this question: ants benefit from group cooperation, whereas humans lose out.
In this study, both ants and humans were tasked with solving a piano-movers puzzle. The challenge required participants to transport a T-shaped object from its initial location in the left-most chamber, through the second chamber, and into the third chamber.
Ants and humans were divided into individual, small-group, and large-group conditions, with two communication settings: free communication and restricted communication.
The results were striking:
Why do ants, with their seemingly simple minds, benefit from cooperation, while humans, with their complex brains, struggle?
The answer lies in different modes of cooperation.
Ants follow simple behavioral rules. They may not understand complex geometric structures, but each ant adheres to a straightforward rule known as the right-hand rule: when navigating a maze, an ant keeps one side of its body in contact with a wall and moves forward without changing direction.
As these local actions accumulate, they give rise to powerful collective cognitive capacities—an example of emergent intelligence.
This phenomenon is also observed in bird flocks. During migration, birds adjust their movements based on the positions of nearby neighbors. Information about direction and movement propagates rapidly through the group, enabling efficient coordination without centralized control.
Humans, on the other hand, often lose out to individual wisdom.
Each person possesses independent cognitions and beliefs. When communication is restricted, groups tend to converge quickly on obvious or intuitive solutions, prioritizing consensus over exploration. As a result, potentially optimal but non-obvious strategies are abandoned.
When communication is free, a different problem arises. Rather than selecting the most competent leader, groups often follow a randomly chosen or most vocal member. Social influence and conformity undermine the integration of diverse perspectives. Consequently, even communication does not guarantee optimal collective decisions.
This outcome contrasts with the well-known principle of the wisdom of crowds.
Research has shown that in guessing and problem-solving tasks, while a single individual’s guess may deviate significantly from the true value, aggregating multiple independent estimates often yields remarkably accurate results, sometimes even outperforming experts.
This effect extends beyond numerical estimation. Individuals working independently can recall more non-redundant information and generate more ideas than the same number of people brainstorming together.
However, the wisdom of crowds is fragile. When individuals are exposed to others’ opinions before forming their own judgments, social conformity reduces diversity and accuracy. To effectively harness collective intelligence, individuals must:
We often say “strength in numbers”, but both nature and human society reveal a paradox worth pondering:
Creatures following simple rules can display powerful collective intelligence,
while humans, endowed with complex cognition, may fall into group inefficiency.
In complex tasks, the effectiveness of cooperation depends not on individual intelligence, but on whether individual behaviors can be transformed into orderly collective mechanisms.
In public crises, failure to cooperate can be fatal. To make human cooperation truly effective, structured coordination is essential—one that encourages independent thought first, followed by the integration of diverse perspectives.
As societies confront increasingly complex challenges, the future of cooperation depends on whether we can balance individual intelligence with collective efficiency.
Can we design rules of cooperation that preserve independence while enabling coordination?
Can collective intelligence become a genuine driving force for social progress?
These are questions we urgently need to address.
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