Wanna be the leader? You gotta have friends

As ever, it's not what you know, but who: the structure of social networks, both online and off, seems to confer leadership on those with the most friends. Chains of command can form without members of a group ? including the leader ? ever needing to know who's on top.

It is often suggested that the most influential individuals are also the best connected, but the idea has been difficult to test in a real-world setting. Cedric Sueur of the Free University of Brussels (ULB), Belgium, and colleagues instead looked at how two species of macaque ? Macaca tonkeana and Macaca mulatta ? reach group decisions, such as when and where to move on.

Rule of thumb

They found that the leadership hierarchy in both species emerged via a simple rule-of-thumb: individuals followed the lead of their closest affiliates. Consequently, the individual with the most social connections becomes the leader in a self-reinforcing hierarchy.

There seem to be advantages to following the most socially connected individual. "If others in the group happen upon a bit of information then maybe [the socially connected leader] will have better access to that as well," says co-author Andrew King of the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield, UK. That means the leader will tend to make better-informed decisions. "From a very simple rule of following your mates, you get these decisions that seem to be best," he says.

King is now experimenting with similar network structures in fish. "We hope that these are general principles that we're uncovering," he says.

George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, who was not involved in the study, suggests that such structures may indeed be common. "A lot of the properties we see in food webs [the feeding connections between organisms] can be obtained with really simple assembly rules," he says.

Sugihara also highlights the importance of identifying similar patterns of connectivity in human society. A recent study of Facebook connections suggests that when it comes to people, more variables come into play. Gender, age and relationship status all help determine our level of influence over acquaintances.

Journal reference: Complex System Society Proceedings, in press

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