A nice piece here on BBC FUTURE about decision making in insects. bbc.co.uk/future/article/202… Here’s the part about our recent work with locusts and humans. "Getting people to change their minds is hard, especially when a group is split between two options. 1/10

The debate can quickly descend into a stark black-or-white binary, leaving everyone feeling even more entrenched in their ways. Fortunately, a recent study on locusts points to a way out of this common bind. 2/10

Marching locusts are locusts so juvenile they still don't know how to fly, so they march instead. 3/10

In his experiment, Christian (Kit) Yates*, professor of mathematical biology at the University of Bath, UK, put groups of them in a ring-shaped arena to observe how they collectively decide which direction to go. 4/10

He realised they routinely flip-flop direction, after a moment of stalling. It turns out that it is this fleeting moment of suspension – when more and more locusts stop marching and become neutral – that helps the swarm break out of one consensus and switch to the other. 5/10

In the experiment, Yates also tested 19 humans with a similar task: he ran a game where participants could choose between X and Y, or abstain. 6/10

Like the locusts, they found that when people had the option to abstain, it helped the group reach a consensus – just X or just Y – more "quickly and cleanly" than when they didn't, says Yates. 7/10

That's because, Yates explains, in a large and highly engaged group, lots of small, independent influences average out, so the overarching direction is hard to budge. But if many individuals become neutral, even just for a moment, the group of decision-makers shrinks. 8/10

"With fewer active votes in play, the same small nudge – a brief local cluster moving the other way, a noisy bit of information, a couple of people switching allegiance – produces a larger proportional effect on the group's direction," says Yates. 9/10