couzin2011uninformed
Uninformed Individuals Promote Democratic Consensus in Animal Groups
Iain D. Couzin, Christos. C. Ioannou, Güven Demirel, Thilo Gross, Colin J. Torney, Andrew Hartnett, Lalrissa Conradt, Simon A. Levin and Naomi E. Leonard
Science 334, 1578-1580, 2011
Media image 1:

"Goldfish Research"

Senator Rand Paul criticized the project that paid for much of this work as wasteful government spending.

By contrast we were quite happy with the outcomes which included many results besides this paper published in Science. Unfortunately Senator Paul got almost everything wrong about this work, including the species of fish - they were Golden Shiners not Goldfish, but we thank him for drawing attention to our work. Here is some media coverage that this created:

- Rachel Maddow, MSNBC: Rand Paul's failed fish tale

- Kevin Cirilli, Politico: "Scientist guts Paul on fish study"

Let us take this opportunity to restate our conclusions that even uniformed individuals can under certain conditions have a beneficial impact on opinion formation processes.

(The photo used on this page is the official government portrait, it is in the public domain.)

Media Coverage

This paper got quite a bit of coverage, including:

- Jeffrey Kluger, Time Magazine, Dec 15, 2011: (link)

- BBC, Dec 16, 2011: (link)

- Rob Waugh, Daily Mail, Dec 19, 2011: (link)

- Christopher Shea, Wall Street Journal, Dec 19, 2011: (link)

- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Mar 14, 2012 (link)

- Kate Shaw, Wired, Dec 16, 2011: (link)

- ABC, Dec 16, 2011: (link)

- Joseph Castro, MSNBC, Dec 15, 2011: (link)

- Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research, Dec 15, 2011: (link)

Street Theater

This paper was converted into a street theater play "Goldfish, Silverfish", performed 6 times in Bristol, 2013.