Synonyms
Definitions
Leadership occurs when an individual or subset of individuals within a social group or aggregation has a disproportional influence on the behavioral outcomes of conspecific members within the group regardless of how this effect is achieved.
Introduction
Leadership is ubiquitous within animal societies, occurring when one individual or subset of individuals, the leader(s), exert(s) a disproportional influence on the behaviors of others (followers; Smith et al. 2016). Leaders emerge in non-human groups or aggregations of animals regardless of the how this influence is achieved (Smith et al. 2016). Within non-human animals, most research has focused on collective movements during groups travel (e.g., Reyonds 1987; Boinski and Garber 2000). More recently, the concept of leadership has been extended to also explain collection action within the domains of foraging, conflict resolution and between-group conflicts (Smith et...
References
Boinski, S., & Garber, P. A. (2000). On the move: How and why animals travel in groups. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brent, L. J., Franks, D. W., Foster, E. A., Balcomb, K. C., Cant, M. A., & Croft, D. P. (2015). Ecological knowledge, leadership, and the evolution of menopause in killer whales. Current Biology, 25(6), 746–750.
Buhl, J., Sumpter, D. J., Couzin, I. D., Hale, J. J., Despland, E., Miller, E. R., & Simpson, S. J. (2006). From disorder to order in marching locusts. Science, 312(5778), 1402–1406.
Conradt, L., & Roper, T. J. (2005). Consensus decision making in animals. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 20(8), 449–456.
Couzin, I. D., Krause, J., Franks, N. R., & Levin, S. A. (2005). Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move. Nature, 433(7025), 513–516.
de Waal, F. B. (1990). Peacemaking among primates. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Petit, O., & Bon, R. (2010). Decision-making processes: The case of collective movements. Behavioural Processes, 84(3), 635–647.
Reynolds, C. W. (1987). Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, 21(4), 25–34.
Smith, J. E., Estrada, J. R., Richards, H. R., Dawes, S. E., Mitsos, K., & Holekamp, K. E. (2015). Collective movements, leadership and consensus costs at reunions in spotted hyaenas. Animal Behaviour, 105, 187–200.
Smith, J. E., Gavrilets, S., Borgerhoff Mulder, M., Hooper, P., El Mouden, C., Nettle, D., Hauert, C., Hill, K., Perry, S., Pusey, A. E., van Vugt, M., & Smith, E. A. (2016). Leadership in mammalian societies: Emergence, distribution, power, and payoff. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 31, 54–66.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Smith, J.E. (2017). Non-human Leadership. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2714-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2714-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences