I thought this reading was especially interesting considering the current challenges that the US government is facing. As I was reading the example of Greenvale in the study, it occurred to me that our government may make some of the same mistakes that the “bad mayors” make in the example. For one, I think that the government may be asking what questions instead of why questions. For example, it took the Senate days to agree upon a plan to stimulate the economy. Now of course I cannot know for sure, but I would guess that some senators were looking for an easy solution to bring money back into the US economy, without having a specific plan, that considered not only how the money should be distributed, but WHY.

Another point from the Greenvale example that I think that our government may be grappling with right now is the tendency to get fixated on one thing at a time. In this time, it is so easy to get overly focused on one issue- getting the economy back on track, producing more tests, finding a vaccine, washing your hands, etc.. Whatever it is, we cannot stay focused on just one of these things. It is crucial to address all of the issues at the same time, as well as continue on as best we can with the regular upkeep of the country. This is, of course, extremely challenging at a time like this, and, as the reading says, against the nature of some people. However, I think it is increasingly important that the government does not get fixated on just one of the issues at hand.

I first learned of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment when I took AP Psychology during my senior year of high school when we were learning about the ethics of experiments. For my Research Methods and Analyses psychology class last year at UR, I watched The Stanford Prison Experiment film, which gave an excellent rundown of the entire experiment. Although I had a prior understanding of the experiment, “The Story: An Overview of the Experiment,” on the official website gave profound ethical insight on the Stanford Prison Experiment. The first video, “A Student is Arrested,” indicates that the surrounding neighbors and bystanders were completely unaware that the student was participating in an experiment, which poses questions to how the public might have viewed arrestees. Once the participants entered “prison” (the basement of the Stanford psychology department) they were designated to “cells” and were even sometimes sent to the “hole” (simulating solitary confinement) if they misbehaved or if a guard sent them there. As delineated in the film and through this website, the results of this experiment were beyond anyone’s expectations, including Philip Zimbardo’s. It fascinates and disturbs me to this day that human nature pushed both the guards and the prisoners to act in the ways they did. 

I am currently taking a class about prisons with Dr. Andrea Simpson called Gender, Politics, and Prisons where we have learned extensively about the degrading conditions of prisons. What fascinates me most about the Stanford Prison Experiment is that it utilized similar degradation techniques to mock a real prison, and we were able to see the psychological impacts this had on the prisoners. Yet, the prison industrial complex remains degrading and with an extreme power imbalance between correctional officers and inmates. The “prisoners” in the experiment endured oppression and maltreatment from the “guards”– through forced push-ups, only being called by their ID numbers, forced “counts” at 2:30 AM, and more– yet this is not far off from the treatment of prisoners today in some institutions. Many female-identifying and trans prisoners face extreme physical, sexual, and verbal abuse from correctional officers; while the Stanford Prison Experiment worked with strictly male prisoners, the abuse is prevalent throughout the clips provided on the website. While I do respect the perseverance of Zimbardo to conduct this groundbreaking study, I wish our society would have taken away from it more policy implications. We could have used the psychological findings to improve and reform the brutal conditions of some prisons, yet the carceral system remains coercive and abusive.

https://www.prisonexp.org/the-story

Anna Marston

Throughout this reading, I found that there were a lot of similarities between this reading and a lot of the terms/vocabulary I used in my AP psychology class. For example, naturalistic observation is observing an animal/species in its natural environment without causing any distractions just observing g how it would usually act on its own. The next term that stood out to me was a retrospective case study which is “A type of longitudinal case study design in which all data, including first-person accounts, are collected after the fact. The events and activities under study have already occurred, and the outcomes of these events and activities are known.” Studying why something happened or looking at the cause and effect after the event has occurred. Finally, the last term that stood out to me was a correlational study. In correlational studies, there is no such thing as causation there are only relationships between two entities. For example, +1 being a perfect positive correlation, 0 being no correlation, and -1 being a perfect negative correlation.  

When thinking of naturalistic observation what first came to my mind was Jane Goodall and her observation of chimpanzees in the wild. She observed their behaviors from afar without drawing attention to herself causing the monkeys to likely change their behavior. In the reading, the example that they gave relating to retrospective case studies was studying why people protested/what caused people to protest and discovering the link between the two. For correlational studies what stood out to me during my psychology class was that the reason why correlation does not lead to causation is that there are extremely strange correlational relationships such as eating watching the movie Nemo can lead to children taking longer to become potty trained strange studies like that.

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”

At the beginning of the article the author gives an example of overpopulation, how timely. We are in the middle of a Pandemic and one of the few positives to arise out of that pandemic is the evidence arising on overpopulation and pollution. Have you seen Venice? Have you seen the Dolphins in the Venice Channels?? We are surviving and nature is thriving.

https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/coronavirus/venice-canals-clear-dolphins-swim-italy-lockdown/

This is what I like to call a Worldwide naturalistic observation. The world is not ending. Quite the contrary, this is not the end, but a beautiful chance to start over. We needed something big to wake us up and get us back to the human condition. This time is an experiment and a chance to find new evidence. We should not return to normal. Look at all the evidence, the Venice Channels, the dolphins, China’s reduced pollution by 40% and ask ourselves do we want to return to normal.

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.

The evolutionary perspective given by Von Rueeden and Van Vugt brought up many new ideas for me in terms of leadership and followership in the SSS and LSS scopes. Their ideas on how sometimes the evolutionary changes of leadership and followers are mismatched in modern contexts was a new concept for me. They touch on dominance and the impact the dominant trait has on today’s decisions made my followers. There is a fine line between leadership and dominance, it is something many are wary of. The authors explain that there has been a sensitivity formed to exploitation throughout time and that followers are very wary of exploitation today by would-be dominant leaders. Hence, it is crucial to emphasize integrity and fairness as a leader, to avoid that sensitivity spike by followers.

Many of the topics the paper discusses are pretty much unalterable, race, gender, height, etc. But this sensitivity and personality trait idea is malleable in the hands of leaders. People running for positions in the LSS context know what is important to followers. There are specialists made to design the disposition of leaders to the public, it is has become “I appear to be sensitive,” (switch out whatever personality trait you want in place of ‘sensitive’). This is through adds, donations, press releases, speeches, etc. My point is that in that LLS context, someone can easily appear a certain way. That is why women wear heels, to appear taller. This is one of the flaws in the LLS context, the leader is so far away, followers see what is made for them to see. While in the SSS context, leaders are in that collaborative state and must be seen.

I think it is important for us to know the different ways of gathering evidence so that we can better judge information we are taking in. Specifically for this class, it will help us determine whether someone is making a good argument. If someone is using data gathered from poor research methods, we will be able to see that and judge the argument accordingly. However, if the research methods were sound, we will have an easier time trusting the research used to back up the argument. Each research method has limitations, so it important to apply the right one for the right situation,

I thought looking at SSSs in the second article was very interesting because this is where we can see leadership in its most natural state in my opinion. It sort of connects to the first reading and naturalistic observation because people in LSSs know they are being observed in a way and take on leadership roles for much different reasons. But the reasons people become leaders in SSSs explain a lot about human nature and our natural tendencies. These are things we should be aware of and keep in mind when examining leadership.

COVID Warning

Reading about Leadership in small scale societies reminded me a lot of the current pandemic we are living through. Being responsible by social distancing and not physically interacting with others has taken a toll on  our norm of interacting in college. Just like small-scale societies, we humans look for face to face contact and even though our generation has grown up entirely around technology and social media, I believe we all still need that physical interaction. Humans are emotional beings that need interaction from others often. I know for myself personally I look to interact with someone everyday while I’m stuck in my house.

In the midst of this crisis, we all waited to hear from President Crutcher about what will happen with the rest of our Spring Semester. In our small scale society at the University of Richmond, we look towards our leaders for answers that concern the whole population. It is interesting to see how we as humans have our own small societies and how they affect us on a daily basis. Having a complete change to routine is definitely going to take time to get adjusted to.

In Methods of Gathering Scientific Evidence, it brought into my mind the amount of experiments scientists must be doing in order to know more about this virus. I can imagine sociologists studying how the public reacts during a crisis and how ‘panic buying’ has influenced many people across the US. So many questions can be asked during this crisis using various scientific methods to achieve an answer. It will be interesting to read about the results from all these findings once we finally move past this pandemic.