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Humans flock like sheep and birds, subconsciously following a minority of people who seem to know where they are going, according to new research.
The study, led by Prof Jens Krause with PhD student John Dyer of Leeds University and colleagues at the Universities of Oxford and Wales Bangor, conducted a series of experiments in which volunteers were asked to walk randomly around a large hall without talking to each other, but keeping within arms length of other individuals. Within the group, a select few individuals received more detailed information about where to walk.
The research entitled “Consensus decision making in human crowds,” and published in the journal Animal Behaviour, showed that it takes a minority of just 5 percent of what were termed “informed individuals” to influence the direction of a crowd of a minimum of 200 people. The remaining herd of 95 percent followed, forming a self-organising, snake-like structure, without realising it.
Professor Krause said:
There are strong parallels with animal grouping behaviour
We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd but what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another. In most cases the participants didn’t realise they were being led by others.
Other experiments in the study used groups of different sizes, with different ratios of ‘informed individuals’. Here, the research findings showed that as the number of people in a crowd increased, the number of informed individuals decreased. In large crowds of 200 or more, five percent of the group was enough to influence the direction in which it travels.
The research also looked at different scenarios for the location of the ‘informed individuals’ to determine if where they were located had a bearing on the time it took for the crowd to follow.
Jens Krause continued:
We initially started looking at consensus decision making in humans because we were interested in animal migration, particularly birds, where it can be difficult to identify the leaders of a flock, but it just goes to show that there are strong parallels between animal grouping behaviour and human crowds.
More striking was that the study found that even when people were shown a faster route, they still preferred to stick with the old one, and continued to tell others to take the long road too.
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Posted by Jonathan in Anthropology, Biology