Dominik Deffner

Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Dominik Deffner’s research sits at the intersection of collective behavior, cognitive science, and evolutionary dynamics, with a focus on how individual decision-making scales to group-level outcomes. His most cited work, “Visual social information use in collective foraging” (2024, 15 citations), tackles a fundamental puzzle: how do agents balance personal experience with social cues in real-world, physically embedded systems? By designing controlled foraging experiments, Deffner reveals the micro-level mechanisms—such as visual attention and copying strategies—that drive emergent collective patterns like swarm intelligence or information cascades. This work bridges cognitive psychology and theoretical biology, offering testable models for everything from animal groups to human teams. His earlier paper (2023, 4 citations) lays the groundwork by formalizing the personal-social information trade-off in noisy environments. Though early in his career, Deffner’s integration of empirical rigor with computational modeling has already shaped discussions on collective intelligence. His findings carry implications for robotics, crowd dynamics, and even organizational design, making him a rising voice in the study of how simple rules produce complex, adaptive group behavior.