We Can't Waggle

In class on Wednesday, we tried to scout out which classroom had the most people in it by looking around on a floor and reporting the rooms we thought had the most. Using the information obtained from people who went to other floors, we went out a second time to compare information and came back to vote. There were two rooms that we ended up voting on, and unfortunately the best room lost. As Professor Lazer stated, if we had another round everyone would have gone to the room they hadn’t previously seen and the winner would have probably been clear.

I think the biggest issues in our experiment was a lack of innate abilities. Bees have been telling the others about the sites for many years. Most of the time, a bee does not live long enough to swarm and look for a new home, so the information isn’t being passed down, but it is instinctual information. They know how to perform the waggle dances and how to manipulate these dances to relatively show how enthusatic any bee should be about this site. This ability was lacking in our class and perhaps lead to the need for an additional round to get the right answer. After all of the choices were placed on the board, some gestures were done to identify the most promising choices. After seeing the “waggle dances” for those rooms, many of us went to see those options. These rooms did not live up to what we were expecting and sent us to the less than promising options. Later when we were allowed to talk about the exercise, people who “waggled” said they were just saying it was the best on that floor. The people trying to tell us about the option did not know how to communicate that well nonverbally, and the rest of us did not interpret the information well.

Bees have a relatively universal way of expressing and understanding each other nonverbally and through these dances they communicate their choices without having to explain reasoning. As humans, we rely on communication as a way to reason because without justification, we do not necessarily trust in what others are telling us. I think that after eliminating the competition rooms, most of us just selected the room that was the biggest out of what we saw. We used others information as a guide for what to see next, but when we saw a bunch of people starring one room, if we hadn’t seen it, we voted for ours. Since we couldn’t express how confident we were or offer support for our decision, we did not all converge on one room.