Abstract
Relationships we have with our friends, family, or colleagues influence our personal decisions, as well as decisions we make together with others. As in human beings, despotism and egalitarian societies seem to also exist in animals. While studies have shown that social networks constrain many phenomena from amoebae to primates, we still do not know how consensus emerges from the properties of social networks in many biological systems. We created artificial social networks that represent the continuum from centralized to decentralized organization and used an agent-based model to make predictions about the patterns of consensus and collective movements we observed according to the social network. These theoretical results showed that different social networks and especially contrasted ones – star network vs. equal network - led to totally different patterns. Our model showed that, by moving from a centralized network to a decentralized one, the central individual seemed to lose its leadership in the collective movement's decisions. We, therefore, showed a link between the type of social network and the resulting consensus. By comparing our theoretical data with data on five groups of primates, we confirmed that this relationship between social network and consensus also appears to exist in animal societies.
Highlights
As the main topic of our study is based on the impact of the central individual on collective decision-making, we studied how the relationships between all non central individuals c and the central individual C influenced the patterns of decision-making during collective movements, i.e., who is the most successful individual in terms of number of followers and how rapidly followers join the movement
This study aimed to observe different patterns of collective decision-making according to the distribution of relationships within the group
Our results showed that different social networks, and especially opposite ones – star vs. equal network - led to very different patterns
Summary
Any decision made by an individual is influenced by the relationships he or she has with people in different circumstances. The head of a firm, or the parents in a family, may exert greater influence in the decision-making process than other contributors do. People generally decide individually which candidate they will vote for, even if friends and family may influence their decision to a certain extent. This study aimed to understand how the social network – the structure of social relationships between the members of a group - may affect the influence of these individuals on collective decision-making and lead to unshared or shared consensus [1,2,3,4]
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