Types of information searchers : stability in information search behaviour and its implications

The choices individuals make are based on the information they have. Differences in search behaviours between individuals in decisions from experience experiments are therefore of importance. Studies on animal foraging provide direction for researching such differences since information search behaviours used by humans may have originally evolved for use in foraging. Such studies suggest that personality differences between individuals result in stable differences in foraging behaviours. Such differences could arise and be sustained by a changing environment where multiple stable strategies will work at least some of the time such that they are equally beneficial on average. Alternatively, the frequency dependence of some foraging behaviours may allow for the coexistence of behavioural types. Brief overviews of the literature on animal foraging behaviours, personality, decisions from experience, and frequency dependence relating to information search are provided in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 employs decisions from experience experiments to investigate whether personality results in stable differences in information search behaviours between individuals. The results indicate that of the Big Five factors of personality Extraversion and Openness have the most consistent impact on information search behaviours. The impact is sufficient that it results in differing payoffs between individuals depending on whether search is costly or not. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 investigate how frequency dependence in a form of information search, social learning (learning from others), can result in heterogeneity in information search behaviours in a population. Specifically, Chapter 4 investigates how social learning may allow a population to attain greater size if it reduces per capita resource consumption, which may help explain how even nonflexible information search strategies may be beneficial and thus be more likely to coexist. Chapter 5 meanwhile investigates how the need to develop absorptive capacity (capacity to understand others) through individual learning (learning by oneself) may increase the fitness of a population but also reduce the range of types of learners. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses the implications of the overall results while also discussing potential future research directions. I conclude that people do exhibit stable differences in their information search behaviours, these differences may be related to personality, and that they can impact how well people perform in specific circumstances (e.g. in a changing environment), which together with the frequency dependence and benefits of social learning may explain the coexistence of different types of information searchers