Ecological Psychology Meets Ecology: Apis mellifera as a Model for Perception-Action, Social Dynamics, and Human Factors

Abstract Previous ecological research on social dynamics has largely been conducted on human dyads; however, to provide support for Hume's touchstone, ecological psychologists must also investigate the perception-action and collective action capabilities of non-humans. This approach allows us to circumvent possible cognitivist interpretations of complex social phenomena by exploring social dynamics across organisms with a range of abilities. Here, we outline how the integration of ecology and ecological psychology will benefit ecological theory (i.e., by informing large scale human collective coordination) and the way we engineer collaborative human groups. To demonstrate the benefits of this avenue of research, we detail the well-studied communication system of the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, and highlight the context-sensitivity and specificity of their communicative signals. We discuss two collective social phenomena in bees—swarming and task allocation—and how their study can inform human interpersonal dynamics. In order to use insects as a basis for improving human group coordination, we suggest that we must not only identify a suitable insect but also a particular phenomenon that shares the same values along critical dimensions of variability. We end by providing potential real-world implications of this disciplinary cross-pollination.