Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Comment
. 2018 Oct 24;285(1889):20181274.
doi: 10.1098/rspb.2018.1274.

Identification of acutely sick people: individual differences and social information use

Ralf H J M Kurvers  1   2 , Max Wolf  2
Affiliations
Comment

Identification of acutely sick people: individual differences and social information use

Ralf H J M Kurvers et al. Proc Biol Sci. .
No abstract available

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

We declare we have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The observed (a, b) and (assuming no individual differences) expected (c, d) distributions of raters' discrimination ability (i.e. d-prime) and response bias when discriminating between healthy and sick individuals (see main text for details). The black and red dashed lines show the median performance and the 95% CIs of the expected distribution, respectively. (a) The observed distribution of raters’ d-prime had a stronger right-skewed distribution than expected (c), indicating a substantially higher number of high-performers than expected. (b) The observed distribution of raters' response bias was substantially more fat-tailed than expected (d), indicating substantial individual differences in how individuals balance the trade-off between sensitivity and specificity. (Online version in colour.)
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
The performance of individuals employing the (a) follow-the-best-member rule and (b) follow-the-majority rule. (a) With increasing group size, both the specificity (solid red line) and sensitivity (dotted blue line) of an individual employing the follow-the-best-member rule increased. (b) For an individual employing the follow-the-majority rule, with increasing group size, the specificity increased but not the sensitivity. Results are based on 2 500 randomly drawn groups (see main text for details). (Online version in colour.)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment in

Comment on

References

    1. Axelsson J, Sundelin T, Olsson MJ, Sorjonen K, Axelsson C, Lasselin J, Lekander M. 2018. Identification of acutely sick people and facial cues of sickness. Proc. R. Soc. B 285, 20172430 (10.1098/rspb.2017.2430) - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Swets JA. 1992. The science of choosing the right decision threshold in high-stakes diagnostics. Am. Psychol. 47, 522–532. (10.1037/0003-066X.47.4.522) - DOI - PubMed
    1. Krause J, James R, Croft DP. 2010. Personality in the context of social networks. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 365, 4099–4106. (10.1098/rstb.2010.0216) - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Lloyd-Smith JO, Schreiber SJ, Kopp PE, Getz WM. 2005. Superspreading and the effect of individual variation on disease emergence. Nature 438, 355–359. (10.1038/nature04153) - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Wolf M, Weissing FJ. 2012. Animal personalities: consequences for ecology and evolution. Trends Ecol. Evol. 27, 452–461. (10.1016/j.tree.2012.05.001) - DOI - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources