Neutral locusts
Getting people to change their minds is hard, especially when a group is split between two options. 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.
Marching locusts are locusts so juvenile they still don’t know how to fly, so they march instead. 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. 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.
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. 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.
