I think this article takes a very interesting and crucial stance regarding leadership. I genuinely enjoy pieces that explore concepts from different approaches, and in this article I think Von Rueden & Van Vugt offer valuable ideas as to the many layering complexities that come with the development and maintenance of effective leadership.
An idea that really stood out to me within the piece is the fact that in smaller groups leadership tends to be more egalitarian. This is particularly interesting to me because both authors make it a point to stress that humans spend most of their lives in smaller groups and yet the equality experienced in these smaller groups gets clouded by the greater inequalities within larger institutions. I believe that too often in leadership, and in life in general, we ascribe a substantial amount of significance to the studies and research conducted on larger institutions, when in actuality we can learn a lot from smaller groups.
Further, I also find it intriguing that women are less likely to have a political voice in smaller groups as opposed to men. Though the studies suggest that this is a result of physical qualities and the performance of women in historical times in activities like hunting, I find it interesting how stature and physical appearance can weigh that heavily in politics as opposed to intellect and leadership skills. I wonder how this genealogy of women in leadership in small groups has impacted women in small groups in modernity.
I also love the fact about women being able to speak out in smaller groups. I asked myself, why do they feel like they can’t speak out in a larger scale? I wondered if it was something conditioned in them socially.
I took Von Reuden’s 102 course last semester, and a large portion of our class was actually focused on the idea of egalitarian leadership in small scale societies. From what we learned in that class and this reading, I also find it very interesting how egalitarianism tends to diminish as people move to larger scale societies. The greater variety in the populations I think tends to add to the inequality faced among leadership in large scale societies.
I was similarly interested by the fact that due to concepts such as stature and physical appearance, women were less likely to have political voices in small settings. This made me think of the idea of intersectionality; I wonder how this applies to women of color or of minority religions, etc.
Similarly to what was said above, the role that physical appearence and gender plays for women in a SSS is very intreguing. The only way I could possibly reason with this connects to an idea I learned in both psychology and Leadership 102- it is implicit biases on strength and reliability however, in many cases, especially in modern day this is not somwthing that female leaders should be judged by as in actruallity physical appearence does not dictate if one is a good leader or not.
The reason being that stature, gender, and those other physical appearance has an effect in politics is due to biases. People have an image as to what a politician or a member of the government is suppossed to look like. That is why so many older white men are in politics.