Leadership in Moving Human Groups

Abstract

How is movement of individuals coordinated as a group? This is a fundamental question of social behaviour, encompassing phenomena such as bird flocking, fish schooling, and the innumerable activities in human groups that require people to synchronise their actions. We have developed an experimental paradigm, the HoneyComb computer-based multi-client game, to empirically investigate human movement coordination and leadership. Using economic games as a model, we set monetary incentives to motivate players on a virtual playfield to reach goals via players' movements. We asked whether (I) humans coordinate their movements when information is limited to an individual group member's observation of adjacent group member motion, (II) whether an informed group minority can lead an uninformed group majority to the minority's goal, and if so, (III) how this minority exerts its influence. We showed that in a human group – on the basis of movement alone – a minority can successfully lead a majority. Minorities lead successfully when (a) their members choose similar initial steps towards their goal field and (b) they are among the first in the whole group to make a move. Using our approach, we empirically demonstrate that the rules of swarming behaviour apply to humans. Even complex human behaviour, such as leadership and directed group movement, follow simple rules that are based on visual perception of local movement.

Tracking a single pigeon using a shadowing filter algorithm

“…While we see our contribution as a first, important step to improve the data quality before modeling the flock's dynamics, it is clear that our method could be applied in other problems too. While implementation of our filter for already existing GPS data (Steiner et al., ; Gremillet et al., ; DeCesare et al., ) is an obvious application, it should be noted that our method could also be applied to position data resulting from visual methods of tracking animals (Ballerini, Cabibbo, Candelier, Cavagna, Cisbani, et al., ; Gautrais, Ginelli, Fournier, Blanco, Soria, et al., ; Bhagavatula, Claudianos, Ibbotson & Srinivasan, ; Boos, Pritz, Lange & Belz, ).…”

Walking together: behavioural signatures of psychological crowds

“…For example, research on birds, marine insects and fish has suggested that collective movement is influenced by non-verbal cues of velocity and the direction of movement of others [ 14 ], and knowledge of group structures based on cues from individuals [ 15 ]. Visual perception in human crowds has also been suggested to affect movements based on cues on where others in the crowd look [ 16 , 17 ] and walk [ 18 ]. A second focus has been the role of leadership and how crowds reach consensus decisions.…”

Leadership as an Emergent Feature in Social Organizations: Insights from A Laboratory Simulation Experiment

“…Research on the nature of leadership has been particularly fruitful within the literature of evolutionary games [8, 9, 10]. In evolutionary games, the behaviors (e.g.…”

“…For instance, Guastello [9] examined how leadership emerges in coordination-intensive groups performing evolutionary game tasks such as Stag Hunt, thus finding support for the hypothesis that leadership is a complex process where emergence can be described by means of a swallowtail catastrophe mathematical function. Furthermore, Boos et al [8] used the HoneyComb game-simulation paradigm to test how leadership and coordination emerge in human groups where participants can only rely on their visual perception to coordinate with others. The authors found that the rules of swarming behavior observed in other species like birds or bees also apply to humans (i.e., humans coordinate their movement, hence synchronizing it, by observing others and adjusting their own moving patterns), and that leadership emergence obeys to simple rules based on the visual perception of the local movement.…”