Entropy-production cost limits hierarchical decision-making in homing pigeon flocks
Abstract
Collective decision-making requires individuals to reconcile diverse, often conflicting opinions to reach a common course of action. However, within a group, they rarely exert equal influence, leading to non-reciprocal communication patterns manifested as leader-follower relationships and social hierarchies. Here, using homing pigeon flocks as a model system, we develop a trajectory-based framework to infer and quantify hierarchy within navigating living collectives. We find that while small flocks exhibit pronounced hierarchy, increasing flock size progressively weakens it, driving the collection toward more egalitarian decision-making. We provide a physical basis of this observation using a thermodynamic framework in which non-reciprocal communication between birds carries an information-entropy cost. Our calculations reveal that hierarchy weakening observed in larger flocks is a direct consequence of maintaining a constant per-individual entropy production rate across flock sizes. Together, these results suggest that constraints on information-processing capacity may play an important role in the collective dynamics of living organisms.
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BibTeX
@misc{ghosh2026entropyproduction,
title = {{Entropy-production cost limits hierarchical decision-making in homing pigeon flocks}},
author = {Bibaswan Ghosh and Vipul Rai and Harsh Soni and Nitin Kumar},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.31126},
eprint = {2610.31126},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31126},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Entropy-production cost limits hierarchical decision-making in homing pigeon flocks
AU - Bibaswan Ghosh
AU - Vipul Rai
AU - Harsh Soni
AU - Nitin Kumar
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.31126
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31126
AB - Collective decision-making requires individuals to reconcile diverse, often conflicting opinions to reach a common course of action. However, within a group, they rarely exert equal influence, leading to non-reciprocal communication patterns manifested as leader-follower relationships and social hierarchies. Here, using homing pigeon flocks as a model system, we develop a trajectory-based framework to infer and quantify hierarchy within navigating living collectives. We find that while small flocks exhibit pronounced hierarchy, increasing flock size progressively weakens it, driving the collection toward more egalitarian decision-making. We provide a physical basis of this observation using a thermodynamic framework in which non-reciprocal communication between birds carries an information-entropy cost. Our calculations reveal that hierarchy weakening observed in larger flocks is a direct consequence of maintaining a constant per-individual entropy production rate across flock sizes. Together, these results suggest that constraints on information-processing capacity may play an important role in the collective dynamics of living organisms.
ER -