Odile Petit
Fellowship 2013
ARCHIVE
Odile Petit is permanent investigator at the Ecology, Physiology and Ethology Department of IPHC in the Evolutionary Ethology group. She is an expert in animal behaviour, especially in Primatology. She studied Behavioural Neurosciences and Ethology at several French universities. For her PhD project, she compared the aggressive and conciliatory behaviours of five primates’ species and she obtained her diploma of Strasbourg University in 1996 with honors. She joined the CNRS in 1998 and was promoted to the grade of Director of Research in 2011.
In the last 10 years, Dr Petit has been studying collective decision-making in many primates’ species and she is recognized as a leader in the field. She will now apply these competences in her USIAS project by studying a suitable model for exploring new questions on leadership: the domestic horse.
She collaborates with the other scientists inside her department as well as with several international teams, such as the free University of Brussels, where she has a position as a research associate. She is president of the French Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour, which increases the understanding of Ethology and encourages scientific exchanges within the French community. In 2012, she became Officer in National Order of Merit and received the Scientific Prize of the Académie Rhénane. More recently, she has joined the Editorial board of the international scientific journal Plos One.
On 30 May 2015, Odile Petit has been elected Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Literature and Arts of Belgium.
What makes a good leader? The animal origin of leadership
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. Social and political scientists have long studied how particular individuals influence the opinions and behaviours of others. Understanding how animal species successfully reach an optimal decision could permit a more efficient assessment of how humans reach decisions since it is easier to study animals than humans on that topic. For instance, in the case of activities’ synchronisation that is one of the major challenges of any society, animals depend on their congeners to reach common goals and maintain cohesion. Collective movements are therefore the most obvious manifestation of consensus decisions we can find in animals and in this project, I propose to study collective movements in the domestic horse using both observational and experimental procedures. During my fellowship, I will establish the profiles of leaders by determining the respective weights of individuals and the role of their various attributes and characters in collective decisions. The main innovative aim of this project is to disentangle social influences from the intrinsic (more physiological) attributes of individuals. I hope to predict which individuals can become leaders in any society. Indeed, if we want to understand the functioning of a society and establish how bad or good decisions can emerge, we need to identify which individuals play a key role in collective decisions. Ultimately, studying how consensus decisions are reached in mammals will question us about the uniqueness of human democracy, its origins and the evolutionary continuity of group decision-making.
