# Flexible use of quorum and numerosity principles in evaluation of social and non-social cues in group contexts

## TL;DR

The study shows how people respond to multiple social and non-social cues in groups, using both quorum-like and numerosity-based strategies to guide their actions.

## Contribution

The research demonstrates that humans flexibly combine quorum-like and numerosity-based evaluation strategies when processing multiple directional cues in group contexts.

## Key findings

- A minority of target-congruent cues significantly facilitated responses, regardless of group size.
- Each additional target-aligned cue produced further response gains.
- Both social gaze and non-social arrows showed similar patterns of response facilitation.

## Abstract

Although gaze following is an important socio-interactive process, little is known about how this behavior is affected when multiple gaze cues are encountered in groups. Emerging research suggests that both visual consistency of cues and group size may play a role. For example, in groups of three, a minority of target-congruent gaze cues (or 1/3 faces looking at the target) have been found to facilitate target responses, whereas in groups of five, a majority of target-congruent gaze cues (or 3/5 faces looking at the target) were needed for the same effect. Here, in two preregistered experiments, we provide a high-powered conceptual replication of these past experiments and extend them to examine the possible uniqueness of responses to gaze using a comparison with arrows. We found that a minority of target-congruent gaze and arrow cues significantly facilitated target responses regardless of group size. Furthermore, we found that additional target-congruent cues, either gaze or arrows, led to further significant response facilitation. Thus, initially, responses were facilitated by a minority proportion of target-congruent cues with response times continuing to decrease with increasing numerosity of cues’ spatial consistency toward the target. This suggests that humans may use both quorum-like and numerosity evaluation flexibly to guide responses in contexts presenting with multiple social or non-social cues.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s41235-025-00703-9.

Imagine approaching a pedestrian intersection to cross the street. Likely, multiple individuals are also waiting to cross, and monitoring for different environmental cues, including what other individuals are doing, the pattern of traffic, and signalization. While humans frequently navigate complex environments like this, little remains known about how we interpret and act upon multiple social and non-social visual cues present in such contexts. Here we provide new insight into how people perceive and respond to multiple directional cues, such as social gaze and non-social arrows. By testing responses cued by various proportion of groups’ consistent social or non-social cues, we show that a minority of target-congruent cues significantly facilitated responses (engaging quorum-like evaluation). We also show that each additional target-aligned cue produced further response gains (engaging numerosity-based evaluation). These findings reveal that people flexibly combine quorum-like and numerosity-based evaluation strategies when processing complex and diverging visual information in group contexts. In everyday life, such mechanisms may help to rapidly interpret the intentions of others or the focus of attention within crowds, classrooms, teams, or other social settings where multiple cues are simultaneously present. Beyond social contexts, this research shows that similar cognitive principles may govern how we respond to non-social directional signals, such as arrows or signs in cluttered visual environments.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s41235-025-00703-9.