What can the animal kingdom tell us about North Korea?

Scientific American/ By Steven Hamblin

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It’s difficult to come up with a snappy intro to a story like this: Kim Jong-il is dead of a heart attack at age 69. It’s also hard to deny that he was fascinating to watch, somewhat like a train-wreck writ large. But as interesting as Kim himself was as a world leader, it is the society that surrounded him that has always captured my attention. As a nation, it is reclusive, oppressive, and nearly self-supporting, with information only dribbling in and out; Kim’s North Korean society, described as a “cult of personality” around the Supreme Leader, was (and is) characterized by a totalitarian leadership, a Communist economy, and restrictive social structures like the censored state-run media. Now, at the news of  Kim’s death the question that has always bugged me about North Korea comes up again: how do such societies evolve and maintain themselves?

Many scientific fields have something to say about this issue, including (but not limited to) sociology, psychology, media studies, political science, and economics. However, the topic has been a current event in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology as well, and I think that recent work might offer some insights. In particular, there has been a push in behavioural biology to study both group dynamics in animals and the leadership of those groups. A recent paper by Andrew King, Dominic Johnson, and Mark Van Vugt reviews this topic in some detail and makes a great starting place for anyone looking to explore these themes. In their paper, King et al. pose the two questions that we might ask of Kim Jong-il: who leads groups, and how do they lead? There are many reasons why some individuals in a group may lead while others follow; in animals, these include:

* Motivation. For example, the hungriest fish take point position in a foraging shoal.
* Personality. Traits such as boldness can lead exploratory individuals to push forward and direct the movement of the group (a theme that I touched on in my own Ph.D. work on social foraging).
* Dominance. Many species, including primates and wolves, assort themselves by means of a dominance hierarchy. Individuals rank themselves in some way, such as intimidation or aggressive conflict, and the leader is the individual at the top of the hierarchy. Given that Kim suffered a heart attack it is worth noting that – as the brilliant nueroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky has pointed out – being at the top of a dominance heirarchy in a despotic regime can bring with it a lot of stress and negative health consequences. Sapolsky argues persuasively that the trends seen in animal societies may apply quite well to human hierarchies as well, which is something that North Korea’s new leader Kim Jong-Un might want to pay close attention to!
* Knowledge. Informed individuals in a group, such as those with information about predators or food sources, can emerge as natural leaders simply by virtue of having that information and acting on it.

King et al. also explore the way in which individuals actually lead groups once they have formed. In particular, they draw a distinction between passive leadership that is an emergent property of the group structure, and active leadership where leaders signal their intenta and give their fellows a chance to follow or not. Passive leaders lead simply by virtue of their actions, and as the authors point out, tend to be seen in homogenous groups where individuals have little conflict of interest. This is an exciting theme underlying the work of Iain Couzin’s group, who do fascinating work on collective animal behaviour showing that a small minority of informed individuals can have powerful effects on the movement of groups; they’ve also managed to show the same effects occuring in humans. Active leaders, on the other hand, attempt to take control of the group’s movement and provoke an active choice on the part of their followers; an example comes from bottlenose dolphins, who try to influence the travelling behaviour of their group by performing acrobatic signals. More >>