How Did Human Leadership Evolve? - Chris Von Rueden

Chris von Rueden is an anthropologist and Associate Professor at the University of Richmond who researches how humans form status hierarchies and the evolution of human cooperation. We take it for granted that there are leaders in modern society. Presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens. Hierarchies are baked into our world, but what did leadership look like in an ancestral environment and why did it evolve in the first place? Expect to learn the two ways that primitive leaders could command respect from a group, why followership evolved at all in humans, why the Female Leadership Paradox exists, how leadership and hierarchies change as group size increases, whether leaders are altruistic or selfish and much more... Sponsors: Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on the amazing 6 Minute Diary at https://bit.ly/diarywisdom (use code MW15) (USA - https://amzn.to/3b2fQbR and use 15MINUTES) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Chris' website - https://sites.google.com/site/chrisvonrueden/home Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #leadership #evolution #psychology - 00:00 Intro 00:31 Evolutionary Importance of Leadership 05:14 Human Coordination with Non-Family Members 10:46 Similar Traits Between Humans & Animals 14:31 Does Gender Impact Leadership? 19:27 Regulating Leader/Follower Dynamics 27:47 Leadership Patterns from Non-Mammals 40:06 The Secrecy of Modern Leadership 46:37 Link Between Female Status & Reproductive Success 54:11 Where to Find Chris - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  As members of groups, we're always on lookout for leaders acting in ways that betray a sort of selfishness, or that's not regarding other group members as equal partners and a sort of a group project. We're so quick to want to jump on leaders that betray selfishness that maybe they're not displaying most of the time. I think that explains a lot of our fascination with like the affairs of politicians, or when politicians say things that appear to contradict what they had said earlier. We're constantly in the lookout for leaders that might be potentially acting not in our interest.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  What would you say are the interesting evolutionary questions about human leadership?

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Well, first, you know, asking an evolutionary question about leadership perhaps presumes that it was selected for, so that we've evolved some kind of motivation to adopt leadership or followership as members of groups. And I think, you know, the research on that is still ongoing. And so it would sort of require that over our evolutionary history and ancestral human societies, individuals that had such motivations to adopt leadership or followership, I mean, it takes two to tango there, they, their reproductive success was improved,

• 1:21Speaker 00

  or being, just being members of a group in which leadership and followership was, was happening, enabled their groups to outperform other groups. But taking an evolutionary perspective requires us to think about, over evolutionary timescales, where was leadership and followership adaptive? Particularly the specific kinds and unique kinds of leadership and followership that, that humans engage in. Because leadership is fairly ubiquitous across social species. But there are some unique properties to human leadership.

• 1:52Chris Williamson?

  How so? What like?

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Well, I think first, there's a lot of active leadership in humans where leaders will talk directly to other group members to try and get individuals to coordinate, use rhetoric, various other communication strategies to directly influence the behavior of others in their group. Now, you see instances of that in other species, but I think the majority of leadership in other species and perhaps the majority of leadership in humans too might be more passive. So it's sort of one individual does some kind of action and other members of the group observe that and decide it's in their interest to do the same. So it's not like that one leader has actively communicated with other individuals to get them to do something.

• 2:39Chris Williamson?

  Like a lion decides that we're going to try and go after this particular thing and everybody else that's in that pride goes after it as well?

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah, that's a good example.

• 2:49Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  I think humans do that too, but I think when we use the word leadership, we're often thinking more of the active kind, where I'm directing you or giving you explicit instructions or things like that.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  That is more rare, I think.

• 3:05Chris Williamson?

  And that's a function of the fact that we can communicate more deeply, I guess, that we can hold different levels of hierarchy within our minds, that people can be statusful at scavenging or communicating or fighting or whatever, whereas I guess if you're a lion, it's are you big and powerful, yes, no?

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I mean, maybe what you're bringing up is division of labor. Like if you're in a group, there might be some people with some skills that are better than others and if solving some group goal or problem can benefit from a division of labor, certain people do some tasks and others do others, leadership can help coordinate all that. And so that kind of division of labor with coordinated by leadership, really rare. And I think that, but that is what makes humans and human groups so incredible at solving problems and innovating and, you know.

• 3:58Chris Williamson?

  I suppose that that's a reason that leadership would be more important. Like if you have all of these different divisions working, you need somebody that is outside of the divisions to be able to bring them together to coordinate them toward a common goal.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Exactly. And even that aspect of understanding that there's a common goal, I think is not that common across species either. I think humans are really good at. I can understand that you have the same goal that I have, right? Even if that requires you to engage in some slightly different behavior than me. We both have some abstract notion of what the end goal will be.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  And so there's other things that that I think it's not just about leadership, but about some other aspects of our psychology and our cooperativeness that come into play here. But certainly, leadership is, it can be the sort of glue that brings it together.

• 4:47Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What other elements are coming into play?

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Just our propensity to cooperate with others who are especially those we're not related to.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  And our ability to to just understand what other people are thinking really well, such that I can create some mental representation of a goal that I know you share as well.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Our ability to communicate through language. Yeah, all these other things are important.

• 5:13Chris Williamson?

  Why is it that humans have evolved to coordinate with people that aren't part of their genetic kin?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  That's, you know, a huge research program on that.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  A lot of people will point to reciprocity, where it pays to sort of help somebody if they'll help you back. But that's, it, there's sort of trouble with reciprocity according to various models and scaling up to not just cooperating with non-kin, but in large groups with non-kin.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Reputation is another mechanism that might be really important. So humans care a lot about reputation. This relates to leadership and followership as well. And so we're motivated to cooperate with individuals we may not know well or are related to because it has ramifications for how other people might treat us in the future. Or responding to punishment and reward also can be a factor.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  So, yeah, other, you know, more controversially, perhaps, others have argued group selection might play a role in human cooperativeness, meaning ancestrally, groups of humans that were more cooperative outcompeted other groups, and then their descendants were, as a result, more cooperative by inheriting whatever traits led to the cooperativeness in the first place.

• 6:37Chris Williamson?

  Why would it be more rare in the animal kingdom and yet prevalent in humans? Does that suggest that humans have got more complex challenges that we need to face than other animals do?

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think this is, you know, largely speculative still, our understanding of how all this happened. I like to think that a key was a transition to a hunting and gathering kind of ecology, where ancestral humans started going after food that was harder to get, that placed selection on greater intelligence, but also greater cooperativeness, because getting after, going after food that's harder to get, you have to dig up or hunt down or scavenge.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  It sometimes requires cooperation just in the act of pursuing those foods. Or, you know, you could pursue it individually, but you might come home empty-handed, such that you're going to want to share with somebody who could help you, and then another day, they might come home empty-handed, and you could share with them. So, I think this transition to hunting and gathering was probably key to the shift to greater cooperativeness, greater communicative ability, greater intelligence, lots of things.

• 7:51Chris Williamson?

  What ends up determining who becomes a leader? Are you able to predict this?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, there's a lot of longstanding debate in psychology about the traits versus situations, and...

• 8:10Speaker 00

  You know, are there in our groups, are there particular things like personality or intelligence, or even things like body size that are more likely to cause certain individuals to step forward as leaders?

• 8:28Speaker 00

  There's an interesting recent paper that found one of the key things that predicts leadership is our willingness to make decisions that could have that have consequences for others. Even where we're not certain what those consequences might be. Those people that are sort of less anxious about making decisions that impact others. Where there's uncertainty are more likely to emerge as leaders.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  So there are lots of traits, but also situations matter tremendously. So

• 8:58Speaker 00

  you know, for example,

• 9:02Speaker 00

  group members tend to, there's a lot of evidence group members in facing threats, external threats to the group will tend to look to individuals to help coordinate who are have some signs of being more dominant in their personality.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  And so that's been, you know, there are these interesting experiments that ask people to choose a leader and they're shown an array of faces and they're given different situations. And in situations where people are, you know, are supposedly members of a group that are being

• 9:36Speaker 00

  confronted with some other group that's attacking them. People tend to prefer faces of leaders that look more dominant or have more sort of masculinized kind of faces. Interpreting that is tricky. But there's some suggestion that, you know, to the extent ancestrally in their smaller groups, individuals who had more dominant traits in face-to-face groups could more sort of maybe efficiently or rapidly coordinate others or were more able to implement punishment as incentive to get people to contribute.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  But that, you know, dominant kinds of individuals or traits that are related to dominance comes with a risk that those kinds of leaders might exploit you. So there's this sort of trade off, right? That can be situation dependent. When a group's facing existential threats, maybe you're less likely to worry about pursuing a more kind of dominant leader. Other times, you might want to avoid that.

• 10:38Chris Williamson?

  Yes, if you end up locking in a tyrant just because you had a brief period of conflict, that's gonna be bad long term. What are, what are some of the similarities that we have with other animals? Are there certain traits that do seem to be pretty scalable, pretty similar across different animal groups and ourselves?

• 10:59Speaker 00

  So, related to this, the potential contribution of dominance-related traits, cues to body size or strength, or more aggressive kind of personality. In other animals, sometimes leadership is tied to dominance hierarchy. So, who is at the top of the dominance hierarchy is more likely to lead groups to new, move in new directions, or to act as conflict mediators within groups. So you see that in, in other primates, that dominant individuals will sometimes break up fights. So, that, you know, and then so looking in humans, yeah, to the extent we, we have

• 11:40Speaker 00

  these preferences for individuals that have traits conducive to dominance, preferences for them as leaders, and that has some sort of homology with the way that dominance can contribute to leadership in other primates and other animals. But there's lots of leaders in other animals that, that are not high in the dominance hierarchy. All right, that, individuals that might have some specialized kind of knowledge, or are first to move, and, and this is getting back to this sort of passive kind of leadership, and rest of the group just sort of wants to do the same thing. So.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  You know, and so boldness, right, kind of personality of sort of bold personalities, irrespective of their location, the dominance hierarchy can lead to leadership in other animals. And so you see that in humans, too. It's not, and especially in humans, given that we are much better able to keep dominance from exploiting us by acting collectively to keep down dominant individuals, so that, you know, we might prefer individuals to have some kind of dominant-like traits in certain situations to help lead, coordinate, but we're also very suspicious of that, and able to act collectively to take them down if needs be.

• 12:57Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference between status hierarchies and leadership, then? Does someone just, in a human society, rise up through the status hierarchy and then get popped out of the top as a leader, or is there a relationship between the two at all?

• 13:11Speaker 00

  I think status hierarchy is like access to resources. So who gets more, who gets less. But it can be tricky, because leadership itself could be a contested resource. Like, because if gaining access to leadership gets you access to resources or reputation that improves your mating opportunities or anything else like that, then leadership itself becomes sort of much more tied to the status hierarchy. But leadership, I would define as sort of differential influence in a group. And so having more influence over individuals' behavior

• 13:50Speaker 00

  in pursuit of some collective goal. So it's distinct from your location in the status hierarchy, but leadership can be the kinds of things individuals compete over, or how individuals act as leaders can influence subsequently their status.

• 14:09Chris Williamson?

  Presumably, the leaders would be some of the highest status people within a group as well.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  In humans, often yes, but not necessarily. So I think our political leaders are in a large scale societies, right?

• 14:25Chris Williamson?

  Very good example, very good example, yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:30Chris Williamson?

  What about the differences in traits for leadership in men and women? How do they compete intrasexually differently for that?

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's a minefield of an issue. I think I'm of the persuasion that men and women can be as effective as leaders, that gender per se doesn't really matter in terms of leadership effectiveness. But there might be some subtle things that influence how men and women lead, right? So that are related to our evolutionary history. So to the extent that men are more willing to compete using, say, physical violence, right, or to take outsized risks that can negatively impact health and safety,

• 15:25Speaker 00

  then as a product of our sexual selection and processes that are other animals like humans have experienced that can create average differences in behavior across males and females. That would mean that on average then male and female leadership in humans might have a certain slightly different tenor and that at the least would suggest we don't want, we would want lots of women in leadership and not just men, not just for the sake of equity for its own sake, but that there might be slightly different approaches to leadership that would be any sort of organization or country or business would benefit from.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Slightly different approaches to risk-taking on average, approaches to coalition building.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, I think leadership by men and women is largely the similar, but there can be on these average, small differences that might matter on aggregate.

• 16:31Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What about the costs and the benefits of leadership and followership? Because I think, I don't know, when people watch movies that have got a really strong lead in it, that they find themselves identifying with, you start to think, well, that would be me. I would be the guy that's the gladiator or the Spartacus or the whatever that's at the front of it. But it's not just all positives, presumably. And also, followership isn't just all negatives. So what are some of the costs and the benefits of both of those?

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Right. So can't have too many cooks in the kitchen, or else nothing gets made. You know, I think that's what you're alluding to is also you can't have everybody be a follower, and then nothing else, nothing gets done either. So there are costs. And so that's right there is some of the benefits of actually being a follower are that you're a member of a group that is actually accomplishing something. You're able to achieve goals as a member of a group compared to other groups that have too many people vying for leadership, or too few people vying for leadership. Benefits to followership also include less reputational costs from not achieving group goals.

• 17:43Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you're not on the hook for the performance as much.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Right. And at the same time, you're maybe gaining experience to, in the future, become a leader. That's another potential benefit. So, yeah, I think we are all, you know, I don't see any people born leaders or followers. Rather, I think we have psychology that sort of weighs our individual attributes, the situations we're in, the other members of our group, how they compare to us, and we're constantly kind of adjusting who we're deferring to, or our own sort of motivations to try and get influence others. In strategic ways that's sometimes consciously, sometimes not. So I don't think, you know, we're either leaders or followers, but these costs and benefits

• 18:32Speaker 00

  play out very dynamically depending upon how we assess ourselves relative to others in our groups and relative to the situations we find ourselves in.

• 18:41Chris Williamson?

  The situation part is really interesting, thinking about the fact that you might have someone who would be a great leader in one particular type of ecology or situation. And then 50 years later, something completely different has happened and that would be the worst person to choose, somebody that's super risk-taking at a time when you need to be sort of bold and decisive, someone that's super conservative when things are going badly and you actually need to make some changes. All of these different elements. Yeah, that's, that's very interesting. That's something I hadn't considered.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, and relates back to that discussion of, you know, this interesting preferences that individuals have for dominant kinds of traits when their groups face existential kinds of issues. Those same individuals at other times would not be favoritist leaders.

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  What are the dynamics that are important for regulating that leader-follower relationship? Because, you know, you often hear about the tumultuous and precarious leader that is oppressive the tyrant that's keeping everybody down, but what are the important metrics that are mediating that?

• 19:48Speaker 00

  I think key is the size of the leader's coalition. So if they have a big enough coalition that is benefiting from their leadership, that's, that can do the trick. But, you know, I think the more democratic you get or the smaller the group size, such that leaders really have to convince most group members of their benefits. I think key is leaders' ability to display what's called procedural fairness, that they're acting in the interests of group members. So even if outcomes, leaders' outcomes are, the outcomes of their decisions are not sort of benefiting everybody equally, so long as people perceive that leaders are trying to treat everybody in the group fairly, then.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  That's key for leaders gaining legitimacy and keeping their positions. And so I think as members of groups, we're always on the lookout for leaders acting in ways that betray a sort of selfishness or that's not regarding others, other group members as equal partners and a sort of a group project. You know, we're so quick to want to jump on leaders that do things that betray, you know, yeah, kind of selfishness that maybe they're not displaying most of the time. I think that explains a lot of our fascination with like in politics,

• 21:09Speaker 00

  affairs of politicians or when politicians say things that appear to contradict what they had said earlier. We're constantly in the lookout for leaders that might be potentially acting not in our interests.

• 21:25Chris Williamson?

  Is that because the impact of a leader that wasn't acting in our interests would be so outsized that it's super important that our radar is hyper tuned to whether or not they are?

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, we just don't want to be cheated, I think. We don't want leaders to get more than they deserve or for them to like lead the groups in directions that will primarily benefit them and not other, not the rest of the group.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Also, I think there's, there's been some discussion of the why, you know, the fact that we talk about these things too, we communicate about our leaders as a means of us potentially establishing the collective action against that leader, should they, he or she act in selfish ways. So we're not only just sort of trying to figure out as individuals, are leaders benefiting us or acting selfishly? We're also communicating about this to others that can serve as a coordinative device. Oh, did you see what that leader did the other day? To help, you know, in, in the instance, we need to act against that leader, we can do so by rallying around some kind of thing they did.

• 22:28Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. So that's the gossiping behind the leader's back or the discussing after the presidential debate, candidate debate or whatever.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:39Chris Williamson?

  That serves a number of functions. It probably stress tests your interpretation of how that went. I thought that he looked really disingenuous. Did you think that he looked disingenuous? It probably starts to create early coalitions in case you need to do something to push back against someone that it also would create a coalition that says, I really liked what he said there about the, the going to get the berries tomorrow or whatever. Like that's, I feel like we should support him. I've been saying we should go and get the berries for, for ages.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's really interesting to consider that the gossip, especially about the leader, serves a purpose that is like externalizing a stress test about whether or not they are playing that fairness and cheater detection game.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  And also maybe other members of the group, you know, disagree with you about whether the leader's acting selfish. So you're like you're saying that stress test is, hmm, can I get other people to potentially coordinate with me against the leader? Let's see. Right. Um, so yeah.

• 23:40Chris Williamson?

  I suppose as well, that would suggest that leadership, which is primarily done through like very heavy dominance, is going to be a little bit more fragile. If you don't ever allow dissent in a relatively small group, then people are eventually going to find a way, you're going to squeeze it so hard that it's going to come out the sides and people are going to find a way to have a discussion outside of earshot of you and your goons. And then eventually those people are going to rally together and then get rid of you.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Right. But the hard part is when you, you know, your goons, right, is key because I don't think there's any pure dominance, you know, leaders can't act purely on the basis of dominance, meaning like trying to dominate everybody else. That won't work. You know, you need two or three people and then they can physically overwhelm an individual. There's always the size of that dominant individual's coalition. Can they provide enough benefits to those coalition members that can then enable them to, to act more dominantly towards everybody else? But once your coalition falls apart, then you're done. So.

• 24:40Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah. Isn't there, there's something similar to this to do with chimpanzees as well, right? The chimpanzees can band together and then it doesn't matter how big any one chimp is, any three other chimps can pretty much just rip them limb from limb.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, similar politics, I think. But I think what makes humans different is that we are much better able to form really large coalitions, often with non-kin, and can use them to overthrow the existing hierarchy. Rather than like a lot of those chimps or political coalitions are often just at the top of the hierarchy, this sort of, you know, second, third, fourth ranking males maybe coming together, trying to overthrow the top ranking male, rather than, you know, the whole bottom three quarters of the group coming together simultaneously, having the shared goal. Maybe there's even leadership amidst, you know, within that bottom three quarters emerging to orchestrate, coordinate, to overthrow the top quarter. That's, I think, really uniquely human.

• 25:37Chris Williamson?

  What, is there anything else that you see in modern politics that is a interesting reflection of a, an evolutionary adaptation that you think that we've got when it comes to our relationship to leaders and thus scrutiny and skepticism of them?

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. So yeah, I think our outsized attention to leaders' personal lives as sort of means of trying to assess, oh, are they doing things that might be selfish?

• 26:05Speaker 00

  I think there are other things that reflect maybe our evolutionary history of cooperating and leading in smaller groups that we see play out in our large-scale societies. Like the way we organize our leader-follow relationships and often in these sort of tiered hierarchies, we create these bureaucracies that sort of have tiered structures that in a sense are sort of recreating smaller groups at each level with face-to-face leadership and followership. But those groups are embedded within larger groups, embedded within larger groups.

• 26:35Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. Okay. So you're saying that the fact that you would have a Senate and within the Senate, there's still a degree of hierarchy within that. And then downstream from the Senate, you've got the people that they enact and then downstream from that. And so you're nesting, you're nesting small groups that have more power. And then it scales up and up and up until the one person at the top.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  Right. Military hierarchy, similarly, any sort of, you know, business is structured that way. Larger, the larger they get, the more likely to adopt these nested hierarchies. I think because it facilitates this face to face leader follower interaction within groups as well. But, you know, and in ways that can help then coordinate decision making throughout the much larger group. You know, as opposed to say, you know, several thousand people are part of some, some business, you know, with no hierarchy, all sort of just reporting to one leader, you know, really tricky.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes. Because how would you be able to, there's no coalition ability. It's just one huge big soup of people that you're all getting. Okay. Is there anything for us to learn about leadership from non mammal animals? I always think about bees and ants and stuff. And you've got the queen within this. But I never really hear any parallels drawn between insects and humans. Is that because their development is so different to ours that basically we're talking about an entirely different, not only species, not only lineage, but it might as well be a different world?

• 28:19Speaker 00

  And in some senses, I'd say, yeah, that they have these kind of large colonies that are with all kinds of incredible self sacrifice that you don't see in humans.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  And, you know, coordination among, you know, thousands of individuals that's happening really fluidly without any obvious, you know, bureaucracy, right? There might be a queen, but a queen's not actively directing things, you know? At the same time, then, there's also evidence of like leadership happening in terms of implementing punishments and rewards. So there are some, I think, ant species where there's been shown where when workers have cheat by trying to reproduce, produce their own eggs, you'll see in some species the queen will come and target those, you know, individuals for punishment.

• 29:11Chris Williamson?

  Like a public execution.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can't remember what it was, if it's not, if it's just like eating the eggs that they produced or doing something else to the actual ants that did that. There are other worker ants that will take on that punishment role. So, yeah, they're not just sort of like, you know, the Borg, but can it engage in these sort of smaller inter-individual dynamics that involve punishment and reward? So that might be some kind of, you know?

• 29:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I learned from Joe Henrick about gerontocracies. And I'd never heard about those before. Have you looked at these?

• 29:56Speaker 00

  In humans?

• 29:58Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there are smaller scale societies, hunter-gatherers, particularly in Australia, there's several gerontocracies where it's the oldest of the old males who are highly polygynous and are sort of lead the sort of rituals of the group. And what's really interesting about that is that these are hunter-gatherers, a lot of these gerontocracies, and so often hunter-gatherers, you tend to see less pronounced hierarchy, less polygyny, because there's not a lot of wealth for individuals to monopolize. And, you know, when societies get wealthier, you often see males will monopolize that wealth, form coalitions to defend it, and enhance their opportunities for polygyny. So that you see this in hunter-gatherers without a lot of wealth, it's really interesting,

• 30:44Speaker 00

  these gerontocracies. And so leadership there, yeah, it's concentrated into the older men.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  I don't know, what context did you discuss?

• 30:55Chris Williamson?

  It was just, I found it interesting that um he, he mentioned young male syndrome is super prevalent in these particular types of groups, which is you have all of these young guys who have got high testosterone and no family and no partner. So why don't they just run around and cause mischief and stuff like that? And he mentioned that they're inherently unstable, but then how would they ever stick about? You'd only ever see them for a couple of generations and then they change. So there must be some degree of stability. It was in a mating context to do with the fact that these older guys capture basically all of the women. And in order for the younger men to be able to mate, there's

• 31:35Chris Williamson?

  decades worth of ritual and process and rite of passage after rite of passage after something else that they got to go through. And then eventually, finally, they get to earn the rights to mate. I just, I figured that it must be super fragile and unstable.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the ways of mitigating that problem are when you create sort of men's organizations that are, create bonds between this older and younger men and sort of show the younger men, oh, there's a pipeline where you can, you know, with age and time and demonstrating your value to the community, you will get to be where I am. And often, you know, those often emerge in more warlike societies. So warfare becomes that vehicle for the younger men to establish themselves.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  But with these gerantocracies in Australia, it's yeah, much more tenuous, I'd say, because you don't have these strong men's organizations. You don't have, you know, there's warfare, there's some degree of warfare though. And this, you know, one thing maybe helps is, as you just said, a lot of ritualization.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  So I don't know, it's, it's an ongoing debate, but there is variation within these Australian hunter gatherers that was documented by anthropologists. And so you do see, there is some evidence that there are higher rates of polygyny, the gerantocracies more pronounced in those Aborigines that were living closer to the coast with, with sort of denser resources.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  And more, where resources can be more controlled.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  So in a sense, it is, there is some.

• 33:08Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's because if the resources were less available, you would need to have everybody on side. You would have to have everybody working together as opposed to going against you. Why, why is that the case? Why is it?

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. And one, it could reduce the need for cooperation across individuals in terms of sharing resources. Secondly, where there's wealth is more monopolizable. You can defend certain, say, fisheries or productive soils or something, or you know, parcels of land. Those that can do that well can enforce, say, polygony, enforce their, their leadership on others. And so, yeah, there's, there is that variation within these sort of these gerontocratic societies, where the more defensible the resources, the more polygyn you see, the more intense the gerontocracy.

• 34:07Chris Williamson?

  You've mentioned there about the relationship between local ecology and the way that hierarchy, group structure, leadership gets deployed. What, what is there to know there? Because I didn't realize until reading your work about just how much of this is influenced, local resources, about just how much risk there is from outside groups, all of that stuff.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  I think key is, the biggest key, I think, is group size. So how ecology shapes group size is, is huge. So why leadership at all? To help solve coordination and collective action problems, you know, groups face, trying to solve these problems, you know, they can break down just because people aren't able to coordinate well, or, you know, accomplishing group goals could break down because enough people are cheating or free riding on the, on the whole, on the, on everybody else. So those problems just get worse as groups get bigger. And so if you're in an ecology with lots of plentiful resources that enables populations to grow, you can get more conflicts, more coordination failure, more free riding that might create demand for leaders to help resolve those issues. And you actually remember,

• 35:14Speaker 00

  you might even want to endow leaders with certain rights and responsibilities, formalized rights and responsibilities as groups get larger. So group size is one huge thing that is also dependent upon the larger ecology. But then also, this was just referencing with the, in Australia, the more that there are defensible resources, the more that certain lineages, coalitions, family units can control and defend resources and then impose a sort of hierarchy on others by controlling access to valued resources.

• 35:48Chris Williamson?

  What would an example of defensible resources be?

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Uh, so productive fishery, like a salmon run. I mentioned that because you see there are hunter-gatherers in the Pacific Northwest that are well, well-studied because they had inherited chiefdoms. So chieftainships were inherited, they had slavery, and these were hunter-gatherers. But what, the reason that we think that they had such intense hierarchies, a lot of really formalized coercive leadership, is because those leaders could, and their

• 36:26Speaker 00

  families controlled access to the best fishing sites. And so that whole sort of, the way that resources can be controlled and used to benefit you and yourself and your kin, I think is another channel, in addition to group size, that can influence the extent of hierarchies and the way, and the extent to which leadership is formalized and even given coercive, or takes on coercive kind of properties.

• 36:56Chris Williamson?

  Because if the resources were indefensible, then how would you be able to coerce? People could leave more freely, they would be able to go and do what they wanted.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  But that's also part of it. I mean, if you can leave, then you could, you leave. So it requires resources being defensible and there not being great exit options. People are going to stick around because, all right, yeah, you know, I'm not doing as well as other people in this group, but at least it's better than leaving. So that exit option is also important. So I think in the grand scheme of things, that defensibility of resources is really much more powerful in driving up the degree of coercive leadership. But that, you know, also the effect of group size matters a lot, too. And just, you know, societies and communities benefiting from leadership and higher and

• 37:48Speaker 00

  sort of that differentiation of leaders and followers can also go up with larger groups. So, yeah, there's a lot of ways in which I think ecology matters.

• 37:58Chris Williamson?

  Does that mean that more defensible resources and generally more resources overall increases inequality within the group?

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, typically. Yeah, I think that there's that tendency over human history, you know, where the wealthier groups become, the more likely you are to see certain individuals monopolize surplus production or monopolize the resource base that generates that wealth. So, yeah, I think that's, I think rarely the case that, you know, societies get richer. It's just, you know, automatically democratic.

• 38:43Chris Williamson?

  Distributed across everybody. Well, I suppose that's a kind of an obvious, an obvious question that if there isn't a surplus, what are you going to capture in order to be able to create an inequality? If everybody is living hand to mouth, there is only the exact amount that you need in order, or perhaps a little bit less than the amount that you need in order to be able to survive, nobody can start to store anything. Everybody's just doing what they can to get by. Yeah, I suppose that, I mean, that's one of the main things that I learned from Sapiens, right, by Yuval Noah Harari, about the fact that up until whatever. Fifteen thousand years ago, there's no opportunity for people to have massive amounts

• 39:23Chris Williamson?

  of inequality because there's nowhere near enough surplus resources.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, sometimes these coordination collective action problems are, you know, cyclical increases in group size that might have occurred in hunter-gatherers might increase demand for more formalized leadership to help resolve problems of coordination and collective action. But really, to really kick that up and make that a more permanent, you know, especially coercive kind of leadership, you really need the defensible resources where, you know, there's surplus production that can be defended and used to benefit you and your coalition.

• 40:04Chris Williamson?

  What does that, how do you relate that to the current way that we look at leadership in the modern world? Is there something to be said about compartmentalized secretive information, about us not feeling a degree of transparency between what we know that our leaders are doing and our awareness of it and stuff like that? Is there any, it feels like there might be some sort of a crossover there.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  It's, it's, it's strange in our society where, you know, I think most people hugely underestimate levels of wealth inequality. And, you know, whether that wealth inequality is justified or not, I think we tend to not, we tend to see what's around us, so we compare ourselves to our neighbors or our coworkers. And I think that tends to be our unit of analysis, is the people we're encountering face to face. I think where we're truly concerned about, you know, you know, our country as a whole and the distribution of wealth, you know, it might be better served by a clear understanding of just how wealth is distributed.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  And I think most people are not aware of just that, the level of inequality.

• 41:17Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that that's the same both ways around? Do you think that people that are incredibly poor are as unaware as the people that are incredibly wealthy?

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you know, probably, but to the extent that, you know, we see urban environments really concentrate extreme power and extreme wealth, maybe that people in urban environments have a better sense of things.

• 41:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes, actually, because you're driving past or watching people drive past as you are someone. Oh, yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so what do you think? In your opinion, do you think that leaders are altruistic or selfish? Are they motivated by the desire to help or the desire for power?

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Uh, I think you can answer that at a more proximate level and a more ultimate level. So approximately, um, do leaders take on leadership roles because they really feel like they're being altruistic and helping the group? Uh, or they're doing it for selfish motivations and like they have designs to actually enrich themselves. And then at an ultimate level, you know, you could explain even that supposedly, you know, consciously altruistic motivation on the part of leaders, uh, in terms of, you know, having that kind of motivation over evolutionary time scales, you know, might have been profitable, adaptive, because it enhanced your reproductive success. So, um, that's something I've shown that,

• 42:44Speaker 00

  you know, some of my research, even in small scale, relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherers, individuals that have higher status, including have taken on leadership positions or have greater influence in community decision-making, tend to experience greater reproductive success.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  And so, you know, at an ultimate level, perhaps that more that pro-social motivation of leaders can be explained by the sort of ways that that actually, you know, tended to generate positive reputations, uh, increase your status, um, that kind of thing. So.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, uh, now, you know, so even in case where leaders say, take a huge pay cut, or, you know, or do things like that, to what extent are they still benefiting otherwise in terms of reputation or, you know, in other ways?

• 43:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and I think especially in, in the modern world, and presumably this would have been reflected ancestrally as well, if you go through a period of being the leader, as long as you don't leave disgraced, you have generated a ton of goodwill and like, uh, how do you say, vestigial renown that you can carry with you until the rest of time. So, yeah, even though, right now, for the next eight years, Mr. President, you will be paid this small amount of money, you know, you are given an unbelievable amount of opportunities on the other side of that. I mean, Nick Clegg, who was the former co-prime minister of the UK, only within the last 10 years, is now the global communications director or something for Facebook, and he's involved in all manner of, of other bits and

• 44:19Chris Williamson?

  pieces. So, yeah, I think, uh, that makes a lot of sense. One of the interesting, uh, insights that you talked about there is this relationship between, uh, status and mating success. What did you, what did you learn there, other than more status is probably good for mating success?

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Uh, I think because, you know, a lot of the smaller scale hunter-gather societies are often, are often framed as being egalitarian, and they are, a lot of them very are fiercely egalitarian, where people who brag or try and coerce others are rapidly put down, um, group members will act against them. Um, at the same time, having a kind of, displaying a kind of humble leadership and, and providing, being generous, um, can lead to you getting these kind of, especially among men, uh, mating benefits. And so, um, yeah, it just suggests that, uh...

• 45:18Speaker 00

  You know, there are motivations for for gaining influence in any human society. Right. In any in a society, no matter how egalitarian, there is hierarchy, however subtle, however camouflaged, that produces can produce these reproductive variation. Maybe not in a lot of modern scale societies with contraception, with socially imposed monogamy,

• 45:46Speaker 00

  smaller family sizes in general. But at least the evidence that I've gathered suggests that, you know, ancestrally, even in relatively egalitarian societies is likely the case that

• 46:00Speaker 00

  influence, leadership had reproductive benefits on aggregate.

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so you might end up with better mating success in the modern world, but not necessarily translate that into reproductive success with some of the boundaries that we've placed in between the the act and the outcome.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Or even maybe maybe not even mating success either. But what you do have is that reputation that maybe ancestrally would have translated more readily into mating success and reproductive success.

• 46:26Chris Williamson?

  So people still choose to seek it. Regardless of whether or not it's going to cause. Okay, yeah, that's that's interesting. What about

• 46:38Chris Williamson?

  if it was a female leader or a female that had a lot of dominance? Did you ever look at the relationship between female status and reproductive success?

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's not as much good evidence there. In part because a lot of male influence and politicking is just much more obvious than overt than the women sort of politicking and coalition formation and that kind of thing. Also, you pronounce gender divisions of labor, especially in these smaller scale societies like I work with.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, what evidence I do have of women's status in terms of popularity or influence? There is some evidence that it's more women translate that status more into.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Child survival and sort of family welfare on average relative to males. Not that males don't do that, but women are more likely to. And in comparison, men are more likely to translate their status into mating opportunity relative to women. Not that women don't do that, but you know, there are these slight average differences. And so what evidence I have seen, including some I've done with the group I work with in the Amazon is that suggest motivations for acquiring status and specifically for acquiring leadership might differ on average across the sexes. But there are lots of motivations for acquiring leadership, but this fundamental sort of mating motive might differ.

• 48:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Is there a difference in mating success when status is taken from dominance compared with when status is taken from prestige?

• 48:27Speaker 00

  Good question. So I did find some evidence in the group I work with in the Amazon that status based more on dominance related to fighting ability, impacts of success, just like status related to sort of like freely accorded influence that people give to somebody they perceive as prestigious that in both cases, this was a study of men, men had greater mating success and more extramarital affairs as well.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  But for, I think there was a difference though in terms of age at marriage. So the route you get to that mating success differs where I think it was, and I could be confusing this, but the more prestigious individuals are more likely to get married at younger ages. And so there was some slight variation there, but nothing I would hang my hat on.

• 49:33Chris Williamson?

  Got you. And what about the sex ratio? How does the sex ratio within a group change roots to power, dominance versus prestige as being the tools that are being used? And are there any other interesting things about the sex ratio?

• 49:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, so that's a, you know, a good question, something I want to think more about. I think the, what's known about sex ratio effects on our behavior suggests that many, where there's many more men, you can get greater competition among men because they are, you know, more, there's more competition for mating opportunity. At the same time, there's also events that with you have a lot more men, when men do form partnerships with women, they're much more likely to be respectful and less domestic violence and because they're sort of, you know, the fact if you lose that partner, you're then out in that sort of mating game again, so it's really risky.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  I think where men are in the minority, you get, um, uh, men are more willing to, to sort of pursue shorter term mating goals. They can drive that, uh, the mating market because they're, they're sort of in, um, have greater influence, given their smaller numbers. So I think, yeah, to the extent when, when the, the sex ratio is skewed more towards women, there are few men and men's mating goals can predominate in the sort of mating market, um, men might be more likely to pursue leadership and status for those aims particularly, to just enhance their mating opportunity, perhaps even more explicitly. That might be a prediction I'd make.

• 51:15Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. What would be a reason ancestrally about why there would be a skew in the sex ratio at all? Like, men and women-ish are born at around about 50/50.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:28Chris Williamson?

  What would be some of the things that would have caused there to be a significant skew in that, could you think?

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Um, high rates of homicide produce that, especially given that homicide is more likely to involve males and females. Um, so there are, there were skewed sex ratios, for example, in, um, Inuit populations where male, adult males were more likely to die, um, violent death. And, and then there's also infanticide that, um,

• 52:00Speaker 00

  Also affects things. So because of males were want to go out of death.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  They were also, there was also a lot of female infanticide because males were sort of valued. Sort of producers and were more rare. And so you could get this then skewed sex ratio. Where there are many more men. Um, that can then exacerbate the sort of male male conflicts later in life and sort of perpetuate that kind of.

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so women would have after birth disposed of a female baby.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:33Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  So those are two main mechanisms. I think it's adult mortality and then infanticide early in life. Where it's selective by gender.

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  Would intergroup conflict play a role here? Would there be a potential of? Um, I guess a proliferation of women might be if your tribe went and killed all of the men in another tribe and then took all of those women. I don't know how common that would be.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  I mean, I think the frequency of warfare in hunter gatherers and especially in ancestral human hunter gatherers is debated. Um, certainly homicides are frequent. Um, but, uh. Yeah, I think, I think my view is that warfare has played a selection pressure in human psychology for. You know, a long time. Um. And yeah, to the extent that can create skewed local sex ratios, you know, because our psychology does respond to differences in sex ratio, it suggests that ancestrally. We experienced variation in sex ratios.

• 53:32Chris Williamson?

  That is so interesting. Yes.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  It would have to come from somewhere.

• 53:35Chris Williamson?

  Yes, dude, I love that. I love that. And I love the fact that. The only reason that we're able to respond to this is because previously we would have been exposed to it.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  I mean, you could argue some kind of like, well, you could reason your, you know, you find yourself in some. Sex ratio and you could sort of use some kind of logic or reason to suggest, oh, I should adapt my mating psychology now, you know, but.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  You know, I I I'm persuaded that, you know, evolution has shaped our psychology such that it's responsive by design to variation and sex ratio.

• 54:08Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that's that is really, really cool. Look, Chris Von Rueden, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they go on the internet?

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Google Chris Von Rueden, look for my Google sites, website, they got some papers and talks and public sort of popular articles and stuff up there, so look for me there.

• 54:25Chris Williamson?

  Chris, I appreciate you, thank you.

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