Kit Yates

But actually, what we saw when we looked at the locusts more carefully was that

Some of these locusts just stop.

They butt into someone and then they stop.

They don't immediately turn and they become effectively neutral.

And so you go through this, when you're switching from one direction to the other, you go through this high neutrality event where you have lots of locusts who are just stopped waiting for the others to sort of battle it out with each other and make up their mind.

And that allows them to form consensus more quickly when consensus is the important thing.

Well, we never got quite as far as the country level, but we did do some human-based experiments.

So we recruited people to play a game, if you like.

It was a voting game.

They had two possibilities of either voting for option A or option B. I vote A.

Yeah, well, you're good then.

Well, you might lose out there, right?

So there's a reward system going on.

But also people are allowed to abstain.

So if you wanted to take part in the vote each round, we did sequential rounds of voting.

If you want to take part in the vote, it would cost you 100 points.

But if you voted with the consensus, with what most other people in the group were doing, you got 150 points back.

So you could gain 50 points overall.

Or, you could be neutral, and that wouldn't cost you anything.

And so what we said to the people was, if you vote with a consensus the most times, you get a monetary reward.