Von Rueden and Van Vugt’s article discusses leadership roles in small-scale societies (SSS) as an influence to leadership in large-scale societies (LSS).  An interesting component of leadership they address is the scope of influence that leaders in SSS  are granted.  They conclude that the scale of power fluctuates based on the size of the group, the amount of cooperation present, and the necessity for conflict resolution.  I thought this was an interesting insight because I had never thought of the amount of power that was granted to a leader to be reflective of the amount of people within the society.  It makes logical sense, though, as a larger group of people will lead to less cooperation and additional conflicts that would be dismissed in smaller groups. In a weird way, this idea reminded me of the economic concept diminishing marginal returns because with additional members in society, there is ultimately a cap of maximizing productivity for each member, resulting in less production capacity per individual with additional members.  Basically, with more people, there is no longer the need for one person to fish all the time to meet the needs of the society because there are other people who can do it.  It allows for more leisure time, which is a contributor to divisions in large-scale societies.

I thought it was also interesting that the central focus for SSS leaders is the advocacy for cooperation.  Specifically when comparing the physical qualities of SSS and LSS leaders.  Aligning with their thesis, SSS leadership is kind of like the reduced form of LSS leadership, in that SSS solely focus on a physically dominating body stature so that there is more reliability in punishment enforcement and LSS leadership favors larger and more masculine leaders as that is a sign of dominance as well as health and intelligence.  For this component of leadership, LSS leadership is en evolution of SSS leadership suited to address the larger and more complex issues of large-scale societies.