I found the The Christopher von Rueden and Mark van Vuaght reading to be interesting. I don’t remember ever discussing large scale versus small scale in the leadership classes that I’ve taken so it was interesting to read about the implications. This reading reminded me a lot of my previous leadership 102 class with Dr. Harwell where we focused mostly on how there are different leadership styles and how they are used for different situations respectively. An idea that I was familiar with and could relate to in my 102 was the “mismatch hypothesis” mentioned in the reading. This reminded me of an activity that we did in Dr. Harwell’s class where we had to list the important aspects or physical attributes of what a leader possesses and listed them on the board.
Personally, my thoughts on what a leader possessed went straight to dominance and being physically fit and basically correlated a leader as masculine. I wondered why people are already inclined to generally view men to be leaders and the reading’s evolutionary explanation about gender touched upon that. I think it is more important when selecting a leader to judge them on their intellectual capabilities and their success rather than physical aspects. Overall, in this reading it was just interesting to see how much of the leadership we see in LSS is a result of the SSS.
I agree with this and referenced the same example activity from Harwell’s 102 which we also did in Bezio’s 101. I had similar inclinations toward the typical fit, tall, male and had to correct myself to think differently. I thought it was interesting that the reading said that less-educated citizens tend to gravitate towards physical appearance opposed to listening to ideas/policies.
I agree, I think that it is so interesting how people view leaders who are more physically fit and male to be better. I think that this has a lot to do with how everyone grows up. I know that because I had a stay at home mom and a dad who worked that my view on leaders is most definitely skewed by that fact.
I find it so interesting that most of us hold this same implicit bias of leaders being strong and physically fit, and usually male, all throughout history despite the fact that we all grow up so differently from each other.
I agree this idea has certainly not been discussed enough in previous leadership courses. Not to mention that particularly now with social distancing and quarantine, the studying of small scale vs. large scale leadership is critical.