From the very beginning, I was intrigued by Von Rueden’s and van Vugt’s article, as I have had others sprinkle in “evolutionary psychology” quite often, but now I have some cold hard facts. My older brother has a PhD in school psychology, so I guess he’s reliable, but he’s still my brother …
From the get-go, it was a good reminder that “LSSs with extensive bureaucracies emerged only ~10,000 years ago” while we have lived “in SSSs for ~200,000 years, and our hominid ancestors for several millions of years.” It’s goes back to our lizard brains, and how we have a massssssive amount of years of evolutionary processes that have equipped us with patterns and instincts that simply do not serve us nowadays. I wanted to speak of one lizard brain factor in particular that the reading touches on a lot, but I continue to wonder how important it is to modern times.
The recurring factor/drive is that of reproductive success/sex/mating strategies. Ultimately, “the currency in evolution is reproductive success, i.e. representation of genes in subsequent generations.” In SSSs, this manifests in how leaders in SSSs would find a means of benefit from being a leader, and “mating strategies” is an evolutionary reason as to why women are less likely to be in leadership positions than men. While I don’t think this is mentioned explicitly in the text, it also seems like the perfect archetype for a leader in SSSs also correlate to the depiction of the most attractive type of man: masculine, physically fit, tall, broad, etc. I can definitely see how our lizard brain still manifests this in LSSs, but I do want to comment on how deeply mismatched this has become.
In our modern times, so much of our daily lives has mindfully made one independent, away from having children. Having a child has steadily become more and more difficult/detrimental for parents who want to devote themselves to their career. In addition, even when we reflect on sex, we now can compartmentalize the role of dating/sex in our lives to dating apps or our weekend nights out. It really is archaic to believe now that our purpose as humans is to reproduce, so it frustrates me that attractiveness, especially MALE attractiveness, still binds us when we make decisions on our leaders. This is nothing mind-blowing, but this rant of mine came about because of how this reading once again shed light on how our lizard brain perceives leadership and how fueled it is on physical survival and attraction.
I loved reading your response! And I share your frustration with how heavily gender roles and perceptions of physical strength still influences our society today. Historically, we’ve made progress but are no where near where we should be. Prejudice against gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, etc. prevent a majority of the population from leadership opportunities and I am interested in actively searching for real-life example of these individuals using “coalitional affirmation” to achieve leadership status.
Thank you for this post, it indeed is a good response. I also share the disappointment with how gender roles and physical features of strength and masculinity still regulates our world. You would think that, that shouldn’t matter anymore but apparently not still due to what Esmi has highlighted above on prejudice etc.
I was also fascinated by the article’s mention of Evolutionary Psych – my dad is actually a professor of Evolutionary Psych and I was super excited to see it mentioned in a Leadership reading. I think that this is a topic that applies to most fields and is not discussed or brought up nearly enough even when it clearly applies, such as the evolutionary mismatch which exists with SSS and LSS.