Doing Your Own Thing, Together: The Special Role of Specialized Roles in Group Coordination

Humans routinely form groups to achieve goals that no individual could accomplish on their own.  Across several collective behavior paradigms that we have studied, effective group coordination arises not from all members acting in unison, but from a division of labor that emerges during group interactions. Successful division of labor is facilitated by players assuming specialized roles, with players becoming consistent in their own behavior, and becoming differentiated from the other players.  The computational models that fit human group behavior the best and also perform the best have mechanisms to a) communicate intentions, plans, and proposals across group members, b) adapt to feedback provided by the environment, c) repulse a member’s behavior from others, d) create plans at multiple temporal scales, from moment-to-moment shifts in task coverage to the lifelong development of expertise, and e) infer other members’ knowledge and intentions from their behaviors.