Spatially quantifying the leadership effectiveness in collective behavior

Abstract

Among natural biological flocks/swarms or mass social activities, when the collective behavior of the followers has been dominated by the direction or opinion of one leader group, it seems difficult for later-coming leaders to reverse the orientation of the mass followers, especially when they are in quantitative minority. This paper, however, reports a counter-intuitive phenomenon, i.e. Following the Later-coming Minority, provided that the latercomers obey a favorable distribution pattern that enables them to spread their influence to as many followers as possible within a given time and to be dense. © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.