The associated article has been retracted over concerns relating to irregularities found in the raw data. Concerns relating to the data can be found in the retraction notice: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/708066 The social niche specialization hypothesis predicts that animal personalities emerge as a result of individuals occupying different social niches within a group. Here we track individual personality and performance, and collective performance among groups of social spiders where we manipulated the familiarity of the group members. We show that individual personalities, as measured by consistent individual differences in boldness behavior, strengthen with increasing familiarity, and that these personalities can be disrupted by a change in group membership. Changing group membership negatively impacted both individual and group performance. Individuals in less familiar groups lost weight, and these groups were less successful at performing vital collective tasks. These results provide a mechanism for the evolution of stable social groups by demonstrating that social niche re-establishment carries a steep cost to both individuals and groups. Social niche specialization may therefore provide a potential first step on the path towards more organized social systems.

Laskowski et al_social niche disruption_DATA Individual and colony data used in Laskowski et al. The authors have identified biologically unlikely patterns in the original data underlying the results reported in the article. The dataset archived with Dryad, provided to the other authors by Dr. Jonathan Pruitt, contains an excess of exactly duplicated response times, spanning social groups and time points and treatments. Hence, the authors have concluded that the data may be incorrect and the validity of the results could not be verified, so the article has been retracted. Further use of this data is not recommended.