Researchers studying leaderless groups found that the single strongest predictor of who got nominated as leader wasn't intelligence, experience, or personality — it was simply how much time a person spent talking

In an unstructured meeting, the person who talks most often begins to look like the person leading it.

A 2020 paper in The Leadership Quarterly tested this pattern with 256 university students placed into 33 temporary groups. Speaking time was more strongly associated with receiving leadership nominations than measured intelligence, knowledge of the task or the five broad personality traits included in the analysis.

The scope matters. “Experience” here meant knowledge of the computer simulation, not a long professional record, and the outcome was being nominated as a leader by peers, not leading a real organisation well. This is one study, not settled consensus.

Even with those limits, the finding catches something recognisable about group life. When nobody has been placed in charge, visibility can be mistaken for ability surprisingly quickly.

What the researchers actually measured

Neil MacLaren and his colleagues formed groups of four to ten students from two universities. Each group completed either a map-based military simulation or a simplified business simulation. No leader was assigned, although one randomly selected participant operated the computer interface.

The groups received ten minutes to plan and then played for an hour. The researchers recorded the sessions, coded how long each person spoke during the planning phase and asked participants to nominate the person or people who had led the group.

They also measured intelligence, game knowledge and the Big Five personality traits, while accounting for age, gender, group size, whether English was a second language and whether someone had been assigned the operator role. The peer-reviewed paper reports a correlation of 0.67 between total speaking time and leadership nominations, a large relationship within this dataset.

Talking was distributed unevenly. More than 61 per cent of participants spoke for no longer than the group mean, and 26 people did not speak at all during the coded planning period. In 19 of the 33 groups, at least one person recorded zero speaking time.

The statistical model still found a substantial association after the other measured factors were considered. The ranking belongs to this study and this particular outcome. It does not establish that airtime matters more than intelligence or experience for leadership in general.

Why airtime becomes a leadership signal

Intelligence and judgement are difficult to observe directly, especially when strangers have only minutes to work out who knows what. Speech is obvious. A person who frames the problem, proposes a sequence or keeps answering becomes easy to remember when the group is later asked who led.

Some of that speech may be genuinely useful. Someone with a good grasp of the task has more reason to contribute, and speaking gives other members a chance to see their thinking. Quantity is not automatically empty noise.

There is also a circular problem. A group can make one member talk more by directing questions towards them, accepting their interruptions or waiting for their response. The resulting airtime may reflect status already being granted, not only a person claiming it.

MacLaren’s team used a two-stage statistical method intended to separate speaking time from traits and assigned roles that might produce it. Their result supported a direct effect of talking on leader emergence. That strengthens the case, but it cannot remove every unmeasured feature of a live group exchange.

A later experiment found that people notice the signal

A 2025 study led by Andrew Loignon revisited the same “babble hypothesis” using 38 teams with more than 190 members completing a simulated Mount Everest exercise.

The researchers found that greater average speaking time increased perceptions of leader emergence. It also increased how much peers believed a person had spoken, and that perceived airtime was associated with seeing the person as a leader. The follow-up paper treats speech as a signal: it is visible enough to reduce uncertainty about who intends to influence the group.

Gender had limited effects once average speaking time was accounted for in that study, although this should not be read as proof that gender never shapes who gets the floor. The authors note that group roles and changing speech patterns were difficult to manipulate cleanly.

Both studies used bounded tasks and temporary teams. Established workplaces bring formal titles, reputation, specialist knowledge, alliances and consequences that a student simulation cannot reproduce. The repeated result is still useful because it isolates a mechanism that can otherwise disappear inside those larger structures.

Being chosen as leader is not the same as leading well

Leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness are separate outcomes.

The 2020 paper asked who received nominations. It did not show that the most talkative person produced the best decision, improved the group’s performance or made quieter members more capable of contributing. Nor did it establish that the content of speech never matters.

I have previously written about people who earn respect by disagreeing without making others feel stupid. That kind of influence may require fewer words, more timing and a better reading of the room. It can be less visible during the first ten minutes of a new group, even if it becomes more valuable over months of working together.

The distinction prevents a cynical reading of the research. The paper does not say that leaders should fill every silence. It says groups under uncertainty use airtime as one conspicuous cue when deciding whom to follow.

Meeting structure decides how much airtime counts

In an earlier Silicon Canals article, I described tracking who spoke first in meetings. The pattern bothered me because the opening voice often shaped the terms of the discussion before other people had decided what they thought.

The babble research suggests that total airtime can do something similar. Each extra contribution gives a person another chance to define the problem, respond to uncertainty and become the group’s most available image of leadership.

This makes meeting design more consequential than it appears. Asking people to write their view before discussion, rotating who opens, or inviting each specialist to speak on the part they understand changes how visibility is distributed. Those structures do not guarantee better decisions. They simply reduce the chance that speed and comfort with silence decide the hierarchy by default.

I have run enough meetings to know that talkative people are not necessarily trying to dominate them. Often they are filling space because nobody else has. The group then rewards that response with more attention, more questions and eventually more influence.

Airtime is easy to count. Good judgement takes longer to reveal. Leaderless groups may not wait long enough to learn the difference.