title: GROUP DECISIONS. Shared decision-making drives collective movement in wild baboons.
abstract: Conflicts of interest about where to go and what to do are a primary challenge of group living. However, it remains unclear how consensus is achieved in stable groups with stratified social relationships. Tracking wild baboons with a high-resolution global positioning system and analyzing their movements relative to one another reveals that a process of shared decision-making governs baboon movement. Rather than preferentially following dominant individuals, baboons are more likely to follow when multiple initiators agree. When conflicts arise over the direction of movement, baboons choose one direction over the other when the angle between them is large, but they compromise if it is not. These results are consistent with models of collective motion, suggesting that democratic collective action emerging from simple rules is widespread, even in complex, socially stratified societies.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. astrandb@princeton.edu damien.farine@zoo.ox.ac.uk mccrofoot@ucdavis.edu.
authors.forename: Ariana
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Strandburg-Peshkin
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama. Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. astrandb@princeton.edu damien.farine@zoo.ox.ac.uk mccrofoot@ucdavis.edu.
authors.forename: Damien R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Farine
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. Department of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Konstanz, Germany. Chair of Biodiversity and Collective Behaviour, Department of Biology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
authors.forename: Iain D
authors.initials: ID
authors.lastname: Couzin
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama. astrandb@princeton.edu damien.farine@zoo.ox.ac.uk mccrofoot@ucdavis.edu.
authors.forename: Margaret C
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Crofoot
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D032921:Consensus; D003657:Decision Making; D040362:Geographic Information Systems; D006126:Group Processes; D007857:Leadership; D009038:Motion; D009068:Movement; D010215:Papio