Consensus decision making in human crowds

By John R. G. Dyer, Christos C. Ioannou, Lesley J. Morrell, Darren P. Croft, Iain D. Couzin, D. Waters, Jens Krause. 2008

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In groups of animals only a small proportion of individuals may possess particular information, such as a migration route or the direction to a resource. Individuals may differ in preferred direction resulting in conflicts of interest and, therefore, consensus decisions may have to be made to prevent the group from splitting. Recent theoretical work has shown how leadership and consensus decision making can occur without active signalling or individual recognition. Here we test these predictions experimentally using humans. We found that a small informed minority could guide a group of naive individuals to a target without verbal communication or obvious signalling. Both the time to target and deviation from target were decreased by the presence of informed individuals. When conflicting directional information was given to different group members, the time taken to reach the target was not significantly increased; suggesting that consensus decision making in conflict situations is possible, and highly efficient. Where there was imbalance in the number of informed individuals with conflicting information, the majority dictated group direction. Our results also suggest that the spatial starting position of informed individuals influences group motion, which has implications in terms of crowd control and planning for evacuations.

Subfields: Ocean Engineering, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e96b0282867bfb48a3f9d4d1f4f23fd913b9efae

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ocean Engineering

In Sociology and Political Science

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Research Advance in Swarm Robotics (2013, background): “[21] has shown leadership and consensus decision making can occur without verbal communication or obvious signaling in a group of humans.”
Individual personality traits influence group exploration in a feral guppy population (2014, background): “Dyer et al. (2008) demonstrated that in human crowds, a small number of informed individuals can increase the speed and accuracy of group movement without the need for verbal communication or active signaling.”
Collective cognition in animal groups. (2009, background): “Studies of human crowds have also supported the basic principles of this collective decision-making process [ 34 ].”
How simple rules determine pedestrian behavior and crowd disasters (2011, background): “3 Introduction Human crowds display a rich variety of self-organized behaviors that support an efficient motion under everyday conditions (1-3).”