Figure 1.

(a) Accuracy over the course of the experiment for individual decisions (‘poll 1’, red circles), decisions made after observing social information (‘poll 2’, green triangles) and when a simple majority rule was applied to the individual decisions (blue squares). All decision accuracies increased over time. Decisions made with social information were more accurate than individual decisions. However, applying a simple majority rule to the individual decisions resulted in even higher accuracy. (b) A sequence of three cartoon characters used in the experiment. Each character wore four of eight possible items (e.g. hat, beard, umbrella and belt). See Material and methods for more details.