Stabilizing Role of Uninformed Participants in Collective Decision Making
This work provides a new mechanism for understanding how uninformed individuals stabilize collective behavior in biological and engineered swarms, complementing existing connectivity-based accounts.
The authors develop a second-order network model of collective decision-making and show that uninformed participants, who contribute only direction-free dissipation, stabilize the compromise state and delay polarization under increasing conflict, without shifting the static structural threshold.
For groups without strict hierarchy, collective decisions often emerge through compromise. We develop a second-order network model of collective decision-making using a dissipative Hamiltonian formulation, in which informed agents introduce preferred directions while uninformed participants contribute only direction-free dissipation. We show that under low conflict, the model admits a locally unique, exponentially stable compromise state. Using a structured modular network we further show that as conflict increases the local compromise branch terminates through a saddle-node fold rather than through a smooth mean-field symmetry-breaking transition. Modular polarized states persist on branches that are locally separated from the compromise branch. Direction-free dissipation does not shift the static structural threshold, but it delays escape from the saddle-node ghost and pushes the observable onset of polarization to larger conflicts. Our work identifies a dissipation-mediated mechanism, complementary to connectivity-based accounts, through which uninformed participants stabilize collective behavior in biological and engineered swarms.