15th USIAS Seminar : The animal origin of leadership

Odile Petit, USIAS Fellow 2013

Every day, humans make decisions about issues of interest for the community they represent. It is often suggested that certain individuals can act as leaders because they have more influence over others. In many societies, the synchronisation of activities is one of the major challenges. In animal societies, collective movements are the most obvious manifestation of consensus decisions we can find. Animals depend on their congeners to reach common goals and maintain cohesion

Odile Petit is currently working on a project to study collective movements in the domestic horse using both observational and experimental procedures. The main goal is to understand how animal species successfully reach an optimal decision could ; in the future this could permit a more efficient assessment of how humans take decisions.