Leadership in Moving Human Groups

How is movement of individuals coordinated as a group? This is a fundamental question of social behaviour, encompassing phenomena such as bird flocking, fish schooling, and the innumerable activities in human groups that require people to synchronise their actions. We have developed an experimental paradigm, the HoneyComb computer-based multi-client game, to empirically investigate human movement coordination and leadership. Using economic games as a model, we set monetary incentives to motivate players on a virtual playfield to reach goals via players' movements. We asked whether (I) humans coordinate their movements when information is limited to an individual group member's observation of adjacent group member motion, (II) whether an informed group minority can lead an uninformed group majority to the minority's goal, and if so, (III) how this minority exerts its influence. We showed that in a human group – on the basis of movement alone – a minority can successfully lead a majority. Minorities lead successfully when (a) their members choose similar initial steps towards their goal field and (b) they are among the first in the whole group to make a move. Using our approach, we empirically demonstrate that the rules of swarming behaviour apply to humans. Even complex human behaviour, such as leadership and directed group movement, follow simple rules that are based on visual perception of local movement.

All the clicking for getting through the instructions and random moving over the playgrounds is generated by the program. You only can watch the process. You are seeing the screens for two players (clients) and the screen for the experimenter (server). The server as well as the clients are all running on localhost, the pseudo local area network on a single computer showing all windows on its single screen. Please arrange the overlapping windows on your screen to have them all in sight. The experimenter sees an overview of the clients, their positions coordinates on the hexgrid and the number of moves, each client already has made.
By the way, we had no problems to run the demo on the raspberry pi with raspbian as OS using several jvm's.
Leave the demo by pressing "Stop and exit". The control panel and all client windows will be closed by this action.
After this first rushing through, we will go step by step through the demo. Copy the file hc_client.config from the folder democonfigfiles into the working directory. It differs from the default values in that autoRead and autoMove are set to false, so that the program will not generate clicks automatically any more, but you have to do that by yourself.
You can now start the game again by clicking on the HCdemo.bat (windows) or perform HCdemo.sh (Linux and Mac OS X).
Read the instructions to understand the sub games. Note, you are playing both players meaning that you will have to click through both instructions and make the moves of both players. In each sub game you have to make a minimal number of moves before the sub game is finished. In the demo-setting this number is reduced to only five moves per player.
Game 1 is just to learn how to move around on the playground by clicking into neighboring fields. In Game 2 you see your fictitious co-player and his/her moves on your panel, and she/he sees yours on her/his panel. Having done five moves in each panel you can proceed to two more preliminary games, dealing with picking up coins randomly hidden. If testing is still set to true in the hc_client.config, the doped fields as well as the fields you visited show their coordinates. This is not the case when testing is set to false in real experiments. You can leave this demo by pressing "Stop and exit" on the sever-screen.
HoneyComb: Getting started

output
Now you have an idea how things work, and it's time to have a look into the output files, which can be found in the sub folder rawdata. Each pass of the game, the demo as well, leaves two output files in this folder, namely: HC_date_time.txt and HC_date_time_MOVES.csv.
The first one contains starting times, positions and monetary gains. The second contains the pure moving data and some pseudo moves.
If you have run the demo twice you will find 4 files with today's date in their filenames.
Here is some explanation, how to interpret the content of the MOVES file: If you haven't run the demos, only the files HC_20100804_140511.txt HC_20100804_140511_MOVES.csv will be in the folder named rawdata. These files are the original output belonging to the very same experimental group, which's screen-recorded and data-playbacked videos both are included in this article.

Configuring experiments
Let's have a closer look at the three config-files. You find them in the folder democonfigfiles, namely hc_client.config, hc_panel.config, hc_server.config.
They go into effect when placed in the working directory from where the jars are started.
Otherwise the program will use the built-in default configurations defined by us to give you a short overview of how the program looks like (see 1.1). Under Windows edit them with an editor like notepad++, which can handle Unix style line delimiters. Do not use Windows' built-in notepad.
To find out diffrent possible experimental setting play around with the numbers and values and see what happens. Each line in the config files ends with a hint, what it is operating. Or simply contact us at (HoneyComb@uni-goettingen.de) if you wish to use HoneyComb(c) for you own experiment.
HoneyComb: Getting started 1.3.1 hc_server.config In the demo the number of players is only 2, in case of replicating our experiment it has to be 10.

hc_client.config
In the demo we set testing to true, to have the playgrounds in separate windows on a single screen. In the experimental setting we need fullscreen mode. We get it by setting testing = false.
For the demo we used autoRead and autoMove to make the demo run automatically. Primarily these were used to test the HoneyComb in a network. Setting autoRead and autoMove to true together with high values for numbers of moves in the hc_server.config allows hours of testing or demonstrating the software.
As a matter of fact the clients need the ip-number of the server to establish their connections.
The item language was added only now. Also the english set of instructions was added only now. The genuine experiments were performed with the German instructions. Keep this in mind when replicating the experiment with English speaking participants.

hc_panel.config
In the demo we enjoy a couple of bright colors, in the genuine experiment only grey shades were used. testing = true makes coordinates visible, when available.
The pair of radius (i.e. pixel radius) and radiusPG (i.e. radius of the playground measured in hexagons) is crucial, whether the whole playground fits onto the screen. For example the pair ( 40, 5) is suitable for the 1366x768 resolution of the notebooks we used in the genuine experiments as clients.

Instructions
The original German instruction files used in the genuine experiment are in the folder intros/de. Only now we added English translation in the folder intros/en. The instructions are given in simple html, as is interpreted by the java built-in interpreter. You can modify the texts, but do not change the names and the structure of the files. Be aware, that java interprets only a small subset of html. Anyhow we can use the intros.css and refer to images.