Leadership, consensus decision making and collective behaviour in humans.

ABSTRACT: This paper reviews the literature on leadership in vertebrate groups, including recent work on human groups, before presenting the results of three new experiments looking at leadership and decision making in small and large human groups. In experiment 1, we find that both group size and the presence of uninformed individuals can affect the speed with which small human groups (eight people) decide between two opposing directional preferences and the likelihood of the group splitting. In experiment 2, we show that the spatial positioning of informed individuals within small human groups (10 people) can affect the speed and accuracy of group motion. We find that having a mixture of leaders positioned in the centre and on the edge of a group increases the speed and accuracy with which the gro

SUBMITTER: Dyer JR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2689712 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature