Princeton University

Behavior is perhaps the most flexible part of an animal’s phenotype since it enables individuals to cope with rapidly changing environments. Yet understanding why individuals make the decisions that they do, and how these shape the actions of others within their societies, populations and communities remains an exciting challenge. Today new observational, experimental and theoretical tools are emerging that can help meet this challenge and help provide both a functional and mechanistic understanding of how particular decisions are made and how complex behavior emerges from individual decisions.

Faculty in Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, along with colleagues in the Neuroscience Institute, Psychology and various Engineering Departments, are well positioned to mentor graduate students that want to study decision-making and how actions at one level shape the behavior of higher levels of organization. Studies range from determining how collective actions among locusts emerge from the movements of individuals to produce mass migrations that devastate landscapes, to identifying the decisions individual zebras use to organize themselves into herds whose size, composition and shape varies, to how coalitions of baboons or humans evolve social strategies of cooperation and the social norms that sustain them.  Although each has a unique focus, they are all have a common theme—the search for simple rules that account for the emergence of complex behavior.
 

The following EEB groups focus on decision-making, collective action and the evolution of cooperation:

Jeanne Altmann • cooperation and investment strategies in baboons
Iain Couzin • collective animal behavior
Simon Levin • the evolution of cooperation and social norms
Dan Rubenstein • social and movement ecology of zebras and other herbivores
 
The following Princeton faculty also research with substantial interests in collective action of agents:

Naomi Leonard • collective behavior in animal groups (fish schools); decision dynamics in mixed teams of humans and robots
Asif Ghazanfar • studies the neurobiology and behavior of monkey agents as way of understanding the evolution and function of the human brain and social behavior 
Deborah Prentice • social influence and intergroup relations. I am especially interested in the ways in which social norms, beliefs, and values influence people's perceptions and behaviors in social contexts

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Neurosciences Institute
Psychology