Cooperation and deception through stigmergic interactions in human groups

Stigmergy is a generic coordination mechanism widely used by animal societies, in which traces left by individuals in a medium guide and stimulate their subsequent actions. In humans, new forms of stigmergic processes have emerged through the development of online services that extensively use the digital traces left by their users. Here, we combine interactive experiments with faithful data-based modeling to investigate how groups of individuals exploit a simple rating system and the resulting traces in an information search task in competitive or noncompetitive conditions. We find that stigmergic interactions can help groups to collectively find the cells with the highest values in a table of hidden numbers. We show that individuals can be classified into three behavioral profiles that differ in their degree of cooperation. Moreover, the competitive situation prompts individuals to give deceptive ratings and reinforces the weight of private information versus social information in their decisions.