An increasing body of empirical research suggests that collectives can exhibit an improved ability to make accurate decisions. The precise mechanisms that govern this phenomenon in particular species or contexts is often not known but is crucial to a general understanding of how collective intelligence can emerge. For example, research in 2017 showed that homing pigeon flocks, when constructed similarly to a game of “telephone,” can discover faster routes home compared to control flocks, and yet, despite detailed trajectory information of each bird, little information was known about how these groups can discover and preferentially retain better routes. We hypothesized and simulated several ways in which pigeons could plausibly combine their individual preferences into a consensus decision and demonstrate that only one of these strategies can reproduce the empirical data. We generalize this to a generic model of how social influence strategies map to collective intelligence and use it to generate new predictions about how information propagates from the individual to the collective level.
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