Computer simulation of leadership, consensus decision making and collective behaviour in humans

The aim of this study is to evaluate the reliability of acrowd simulation model developed by the authors by reproducing Dyer et al.’s experiments(published in Philosophical Transactions in 2009) on human leadership andconsensus decision-­making in a computer-­based environment.The theoretical crowd model of the simulation environment is presented, and its results are compared and analysed against Dyer et al.’s original experiments.It is concluded that the results are 11 largely consistentwith the experiments, which demonstrates the reliability ofthe crowd model. Furthermore, the simulation data also reveals several additional new findings, namely:1) the phenomena of sacrificing accuracy to reach a quickerconsensus decision found in ants colonies was also discovered in the simulation;2) the ability of reaching consensus in groups has a directimpact on the time and accuracy of arriving at the targetposition;3) the positions of the informed individuals or leadersin the crowd could have significant impact on the overallcrowd movement;4) the simulation also confirmed Dyer et al.’s anecdotalevidence of the proportion of the leadership in large crowdsand its effect on crowd movement.The potential applications of these findings are highlighted in the final discussion of this paper