Uninformed individuals promote democratic consensus in animal groups.

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Imitation Combined with a Characteristic Stimulus Duration Results in Robust Collective Decision-Making

For group-living animals, reaching consensus to stay cohesive is crucial for their fitness, particularly when collective motion starts and stops. Understanding the decision-making at individual and collective levels upon sudden disturbances is central in the study of collective animal behavior, and concerns the broader question of how information is distributed and evaluated in groups. Despite ...

Convergence to consensus in heterogeneous groups and the emergence of informal leadership

When group cohesion is essential, groups must have efficient strategies in place for consensus decision-making. Recent theoretical work suggests that shared decision-making is often the most efficient way for dealing with both information uncertainty and individual variation in preferences. However, some animal and most human groups make collective decisions through particular individuals, lead...

Sensory networks and distributed cognition in animal groups

Understanding how social influence shapes biological processes is a central challenge in contemporary science, essential for achieving progress in a variety of fields ranging from the organization and evolution of coordinated collective action among cells, or animals, to the dynamics of information exchange in human societies. Using an integrated experimental and theoretical approach, I will ad...

Leadership, consensus decision making and collective behaviour in humans.

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) dec...