Abstract
The study of collective behavior asks how individual actions combine to
produce a group response. Research questions encompassing
self-organization, collective motion, and decision-making apply to study
systems ranging from cellular systems to animal groups and human
organizations. Recently, technological advancements have enabled an
unprecedented increase in our ability to measure, quantify, and analyze
collective behavior. However, despite similar inquires and the wealth of
data available, it is difficult to make general statements about
principles of collective behavior that apply across scales. Here we
describe a hierarchical approach for comparing collective systems that
uses the intermediate link of “mechanisms” to connect individual to
group behavior. With this, we argue that an effective way to understand
collective behavior across different systems is to ask the complementary
questions of how individual behavior implements certain mechanisms, and
how various mechanisms contribute to overall function of the group. We
apply this framework to compare two systems at very different scales -
honey bee colonies and cells of the body - and discuss how the
mechanisms of specialization, distributed processing, feedback, and
others contribute to function in each. Through this comparison, we
demonstrate how the hierarchical approach can be used to compare and
contrast different systems, and lead to new hypotheses forming a basis
for common research questions of collective behavior.