In “Leadership in small-scale societies: Some implications for theory, research, and practice”  written by Christopher von Ruden and Mark van Vugt they mentioned several points that provoked me to draw on and connect to concepts and theories I have learned in other areas of my studies at UR. The authors touch on how a large amount of theories and leadership understanding is based on findings of Large-scale societies (LSS). This is in part because most gathered data is based on LSS. In sociology and psychology, we learned about different methods of research and data collection. Since these are fields that investigate human behavior and interaction, much like leadership, it makes sense that the data would be limited due to outsider impact on the group’s behavior. We learned about several different scenarios where researchers went undercover and joined certain exclusive groups or cults in order to collect accurate data (groups, especially small groups, alter their behavior if they know they are being observed… even if they do not mean to change the way they act). Accurate data collection and understanding of SSS is more challenging to acquire which could account for why the data on SSSs is less rich and why most leadership theories are based on LSSs, even though SSS is where “ humans spent more than 95% of their history as a species”.

At one point in their writing, Von Rueen and Van Vugt report that “ ethnographically recent SSSs are more representative than LSSs of the range of social environments in which the human mind evolved”. I thought that it was very interesting that smaller groups are more representative in certain social contexts, perhaps because the group is not distracted by more different individuals. I was a tad confused by this. Another section of the reading I found interesting was when they wrote “the currency in evolution is reproductive success, i.e. representation of genes in subsequent generations”; this was just intriguing to me as I am interested in the biological reasons behind human behavior and changes in society over time.

Who leads?

The sections on who leads in SSS connected me to what I have learned in biology, environmental studies, and psychology. My background knowledge in these fields provides a deeper understanding of the reasons behind the characteristics of individuals who tend to lead SSSs. The behavioral analysis of how a human responds to certain social stimuli is based on what they have learned and believed, whether these beliefs are implicit or explicit, and the other factor is deeply based on innate survival behaviors. The text mentions that “ Age”, “Verbal skill and religious knowledge”, “Physical qualities”, “gender”, “Prosociality”, and “social networks” all play into who tends to be leaders in these small groups. The developed implicit and explicit biases of followers in combination with the constant underlying drive to survive and reproduce would lead individuals to follow individuals with while this is dependent on what the small group is gathering for,  to put it simply, individuals follow those who are best fit in terms of what they are assembling for in the first place. In some cases the leader may have the most incomparable and strong physical qualities may indicate a leader but in a scholarly or political setting, physical qualities would only play a fraction of a role in leader selection (which is based mostly on an implicit understanding of what a leader is/ should be (in other words, this connects to people feeling a biased sway towards a leader who looks stronger with the implication that that would reflect in their leading, even when all that really matters is their knowledge)). Another example of this could be the role gender plays when the leadership role is not contingent on sex at all; the implications of what the society wants or values as ideal is reflected in how certain unrelated traits are considered to be strong or weak. Yet, how Von Rueden & Van Vugt put it “leadership in SSSs is contingent on the possession of traits that are likely to increase the benefits for followers and lower the costs for individuals of taking on leadership roles in the various domain”