Least ranked human individuals exhibit scale free behavioral responses in hierarchical social systems

Human behavior is the most complex system generated and represented by the cognitive brain. It is a function of highly adaptive dynamic cognitive states receiving sensory inputs and generating the behavioral responses. Social inputs belong to a class of sensory information affecting individual and collective human behavior for various purposes including a rewarded survival. Many models and theories have been proposed for understanding phenomenological dynamics of collective behavior, however most of them considered a group size effect possibly limiting cognitive scales of a given individual. Inter-element connectivity is an exclusive feature of the self-organized groups, getting optimized in the larger groups, and is a reason for better decision making in the smaller groups. We consider this as a preprocessing step in social information processing by an individual, narrowing down its own cognitive capabilities during a decision making process. Hence, in this perspective, We are considering an alternative form of social connectivity, the hierarchical social system, like in the corporate systems, allowing an individual to make decisions in light of singular instruction coming from its social partners at a higher rank. This model is proposed to unravel hidden cognitive scales in an individual's cognition as its confidence in social suggestions during decision making is expected to exhibit scale free dynamics emerging towards a critical point. Either side of this critical point can be a phase of random dynamics in absence of social information and a highly ordered phase of making limited decisions in light of aforesaid group size effect. We put forward a hypothesis that hierarchical social systems increase productivity and facilitate fruitful decision making allowing more scope to the individual cognition. Four behavioral experiments are proposed for testing this hypothesis in light of exciting scientific evidence discussed in the discussion section.