TY - JOUR
T1 - Plasticity in leader-follower roles in human teams
AU - Nakayama, Shinnosuke
AU - Ruiz Marín, Manuel
AU - Camacho, Maximo
AU - Porfiri, Maurizio
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank Dr. Oded Nov for valuable discussions, Marina Torre for helping recruit volunteers, David Diner, Tyrone J Tolbert Jr., and Hartek Sabharwal for developing the experimental platform, and Diletta Topazio for helping conduct the pilot experiment. This study was supported by National Science Foundation (CBET 1547864) to M.P., ECO 2016-76178-P to M.C., and ECO 2015-65637-P to M.R.M. This study contributes to the activity carried out under the program Groups of Excellence of the region of Murcia, the Fundacion Seneca, Science and Technology Agency of the region of Murcia project 19884/GERM/15.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 The Author(s).
PY - 2017/12/1
Y1 - 2017/12/1
N2 - In humans, emergence of leaders and followers is key to group performance, but little is known about the whys and hows of leadership. A particularly elusive question entails behavioral plasticity in leadership across social contexts. Addressing this question requires to eliminate social feedback between focal individuals and their partners in experiments that could illuminate the spontaneous emergence of social roles. We investigated plasticity in leader-follower roles in cooperation, where members choose the task toward a shared goal, and coordination, where members adjust their actions in real time based on social responsiveness. Through a computer-programmed virtual partner, we demonstrate adaptive plasticity in leader-follower roles. Humans increased their followership to cooperate when the partner led more in the choice of the task, whereas they showed only weak leadership when the partner followed more. We leveraged the information-theoretic notion of transfer entropy to quantify leadership and followership in coordination from their movements. When exhibiting stronger followership in task cooperation, humans coordinated more with the partner's movement, with greater information being transferred from the partner to humans. The evidence of behavioral plasticity suggests that humans are capable of adapting their leader-follower roles to their social environments, in both cooperation and coordination.
AB - In humans, emergence of leaders and followers is key to group performance, but little is known about the whys and hows of leadership. A particularly elusive question entails behavioral plasticity in leadership across social contexts. Addressing this question requires to eliminate social feedback between focal individuals and their partners in experiments that could illuminate the spontaneous emergence of social roles. We investigated plasticity in leader-follower roles in cooperation, where members choose the task toward a shared goal, and coordination, where members adjust their actions in real time based on social responsiveness. Through a computer-programmed virtual partner, we demonstrate adaptive plasticity in leader-follower roles. Humans increased their followership to cooperate when the partner led more in the choice of the task, whereas they showed only weak leadership when the partner followed more. We leveraged the information-theoretic notion of transfer entropy to quantify leadership and followership in coordination from their movements. When exhibiting stronger followership in task cooperation, humans coordinated more with the partner's movement, with greater information being transferred from the partner to humans. The evidence of behavioral plasticity suggests that humans are capable of adapting their leader-follower roles to their social environments, in both cooperation and coordination.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41598-017-14851-6
DO - 10.1038/s41598-017-14851-6
M3 - Article
C2 - 29109413
AN - SCOPUS:85032884323
VL - 7
JO - Scientific Reports
JF - Scientific Reports
SN - 2045-2322
IS - 1
M1 - 14562
ER -