Recently, psychological phenomena have been expanded to new domains, crisscrossing boundaries of organizational levels, with the emergence of areas such as social personality and ecosystem learning. In this contribution, we analyze the ascription of an individual-based concept (personality) to the social level. Although justified boundary crossings can boost new approaches and applications, the indiscriminate misuse of concepts refrains the growth of scientific areas. The concept of social personality is based mainly on the detection of repeated group differences across a population, (...) in a direct transposition of personality concepts from the individual to the social level. We show that this direct transposition is problematic for avowing the nonsensical ascription of personality even to simple electronic devices. To go beyond a metaphoric use of social personality, we apply the organizational approach to a review of social insect communication networks. Our conceptual analysis shows that socially self-organized systems, such as isolated ant trails and bee’s recruitment groups, are too simple to have social personality. The situation is more nuanced when measuring the collective choice between nest sites or foraging patches: some species show positive and negative feedbacks between two or more self-organized social structures so that these co-dependent structures are inter-related by second-order, social information systems, complying with a formal requirement for having social personality: the social closure of constraints. Other requirements include the decoupling between individual and social dynamics, and the self-regulation of collective decision processes. Social personality results to be sometimes a metaphorical transposition of a psychological concept to a social phenomenon. The application of this organizational approach to cases of learning ecosystems, or evolutionary learning, could help to ground theoretically the ascription of psychological properties to levels of analysis beyond the individual, up to meta-populations or ecological communities. (shrink)

In the book The Insect Societies, Wilson proposed categories of sociality that were presented as a landmark unification of terminology in the study of social behavior. Since then, many new behavioral patterns have been described, but they could not be fitted into any of the available categories, undermining the consensus around that well-established classification. New general classifications tried to circumvent the limitations shown by Wilson’s categorization, but with little success. Among the proposals, some maintain the form of discrete categorization, while (...) others advance a quantitative model to characterize sociality. These proposals have failed to clarify the use of the categories of sociality, and none of them has become widely accepted or overcome the problems faced by the classification of social behaviors. Here we explore whether an analysis of types of concepts proposed by Carnap can help to move forward in this discussion. His distinction between qualitative concepts and quantitative concepts is used here as an epistemological basis for analyzing the development of the proposed conceptual changes and classifications of sociality. Recently, social behavior has come to be considered a complex phenomenon, and quantitative concepts could bring a lot of informative data to understanding its development and perhaps its evolution. We conclude that a new metric of sociality should be built, using characteristics that are nonarbitrary, evolutionarily meaningful, and amenable to comparing all social animals. Finally, we advocate for an integrative view of social complexity based on individuals’ interactions as a useful metric of sociality. This approach still needs further development. (shrink)