Today, digital traces are widely exploited by social networks and online commerce on the Internet. In this work we show that in a non-competitive context, the use of digital traces favors the emergence of cooperation in a group of individuals performing an information search task. On the contrary, when the context becomes competitive, their use favors individualistic behavior and the exchange of unreliable or misleading information between individuals.

Over the past thirty years, the digitization of society has profoundly changed people's ways of life and communication. The information exchanged between individuals is increasingly taking the form of digital traces that are widely exploited by social networks and online commerce on the Internet, in particular through the use of rating and recommendation systems which allow users to discover new options or guide their choices.

Researchers from the Research Center on Animal Cognition, the Theoretical Physics Lab and the Toulouse School of Economics have studied how and under what conditions digital traces could allow groups of individuals to cooperate in an information search task and how reliable was the information imbedded in these traces. The researchers have analyzed and modeled the tagging behaviors of individuals and the way theyr use of digital traces thanks to a dedicated interactive web application integrating a rating system similar to that used by many e-commerce platforms.

The results published in PNAS show that groups of individuals can spontaneously and without any prior comunication between them use the fingerprints resulting from their notations to coordinate their search and collectively find the cells with the highest values in a table of hidden numbers. However, this study has also revealed that in competitive situations, the use of digital traces promotes deception because a large proportion of individuals then reduces the reliability of the information contained in the traces they leave.

Read the CNRS press release