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Convergence To Consensus In Heterogeneous Groups And The Emergence Of Informal Leadership, Sergey Gavrilets, Jeremy David Auerbach, Mark Van Vugt

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

When group cohesion is essential, groups must have efficient strategies in place for consensus decisionmaking. Recent theoretical work suggests that shared decision-making is often the most efficient way for dealing with both information uncertainty and individual variation in preferences. However, some animal and most human groups make collective decisions through particular individuals, leaders, that have a disproportionate influence on group decision-making. To address this discrepancy between theory and data, we study a simple, but general, model that explicitly focuses on the dynamics of consensus building in groups composed by individuals who are heterogeneous in preferences, certain personality traits (agreeability and …