Watch the birds in your backyard. If one bird startles and flies off, others will follow, not waiting around to assess whether the threat is real. They have been infected by emotional contagion.
(A)
Marc wondered whether the birds in line were more fearful because they didn’t know what their flockmates were doing. Emotional contagion would have been impossible for individual grosbeaks in the linear array except with their nearest neighbors.
(B)
In a long-term research project that Marc did with some of his students on patterns of antipredatory scanning by western evening grosbeaks, they found that birds in a circle showed more coordination in scanning than did birds who were feeding in a line.
(C)
The birds in a line, who could only see their nearest neighbor, not only were less coordinated when scanning, but also were more nervous, changing their body and head positions significantly more than grosbeaks in a circle, where it was possible for each grosbeak to see every other grosbeak.
* grosbeak: 콩새류(類) ** array: 정렬
