I thought this articles evolutionary perspective on leadership was interesting because I was actually recently discussing this with my mom. We were talking about how some groups are more likely to be leaders just because that is how our species evolved. Specifically we were talking about how men are more commonly leaders because they are bigger and stronger and were more able to provide when humans used to hunt for their food. I was wondering if that is why it is more common even now for men to work and provide for their families.

Something that I have never thought about, however, that the article addresses is race in terms of an evolutionary perspective on leadership. The article states that likely our ancestors would not have come in contact with those of another race, so it may have had a minimal impact.

I thought that the Methods of Gathering Scientific Evidence helped me start to see what Dr. Bezio mentioned very briefly, the way that statistics can be problematic. There are so many different types of studies and methods of gathering evidence that all come with their different pros and cons. These different methods all show certain information and leave out other information. People that are unaware of the ways that different types of studies fall short could fall into different traps. For example, if people just read a one-sentence summary or a statistic that comes of out of correlational research they might mistake it for causation and take it to mean more than it actually does.

I thought that the second article gave a pretty good summary of the many different aspects of leadership you look at in 101 and 102. The sections on leadership in large-scale societies reminded me a lot of what we talked about last week with implicit biases. It seems like in small-scale societies they made better decisions about who should be a leader because they did not make as many decisions based on implicit biases. Though leadership in small-scale and large-scale societies has flaws, I feel like the main reason certain groups cannot become leaders in large-scale societies is because of these implicit biases that many people hold. Certain groups do not fit the image of traditional leaders we have had in the past and thus they have more difficulty becoming a leader.

First of all, I was happy that this piece was one of the assigned readings because I had Professor Von Rueden last semester and read this article before. I was really interested in how what we have learned so far in this class applies to his teachings of 102. First statement claims that leadership is the primary way of resolving cooperation problems. Until now, we have talked about how communication is the most important factor. I am assuming that good leadership fosters communication which in turn breeds cooperation. I also thought bringing evolution into our argument was interesting and a necessary topic to discuss. I understand why cooperation was so important in small scale societies for survival, but have those same tendencies really followed us to today’s modern world? And are they still applicable? Then again, I understand how reproductive success due to good leadership qualities would pass along those genes that promote survival and leadership. I also find the point about our desire for tall, strong leaders very interesting. I think it is easy to compare this mismatch hypothesis to current world leaders today like Donald Trump. Having a physically strong leader, whether they are fit for the job or not, will instinctively make followers feel safer and have more trust in their leader, even if the threat is something that cannot be stopped by strength (i.e. a nuclear bomb). Overall, it was cool seeing how much genetic impact the environment of small scale markets and societies effect our leadership tendencies today.

It was interesting to read Von Rueden & Van Vugt’s article as it mentioned contingency leadership, transformational leadership, and the leader-member exchange theory which are all models that I have studied in my Organizational Behavior class this semester.   However, like the article mentioned, these theories are mainly applied on a larger scale and not when studying small-scale societies.  I found it interesting that in large-scale and small-scale societies, men usually have the advantage and are usually higher up on the totem pole, even if only by a little bit.  Another concept that we discussed in my OB class was how self-led teams are more realistic in a smaller setting.  When too many people become involved in a focused group, it becomes imperative for tasks to be delegated so that everyone has a purpose and stays focused and does not fight with other group members, so leadership becomes necessary.  But in smaller groups, the whole group knows what everyone’s designated role is and so there is not always a need for a leader to delegate or guide them.  I was very surprised to see the overlap such a direct overlap between these two classes because they take very different approaches to leadership.

With my background knowledge from both the Leadership 101 and 102 courses, I enjoyed reading “Leadership in small-scale societies: Some implications for theory, research and practice” by Christopher von Rueden and Mark van Vugt. I have not really studied small-scale societies (SSSs) before, so the authors’ work on analyzing these types of societies leadership methods can help us better understand the study of leadership in large-scale societies. This article defines an SSS to have the following characteristics: “small communities, pooling of resources within and across extended families, food production in the absence of significant technology, and few formal institutions governing group life” (979). Looking at SSSs, as the article indicates, gives us an evolutionary on leadership methods since these were the societies humans have lived for the past 200,000 years. The evolutionary perspective gives us the “why” minds have evolved in the ways they did and the “how” they continue to make these decisions. 

Some examples of SSSs range across the Amazon, central and eastern Africa, and Southeast Asia. In such an industrialized, fast-paced world, it is crucial to look at SSSs to study human behavior and how the people inhabiting them lead and follow. In my child development class, we watched a film called Babies that tracked the development of four infants across the world; from my observations, the babies in Namibia and Mongolia lived in what seemed like SSSs. In Namibia, the families were very maternal-focused and egalitarian across age groups. Von Rueden and van Vugt indicate that SSSs tend to have egalitarian properties; in both Mongolia and Namibia in Babies, this seemed to be the case in instances such as communication, house duties, and religion. While these were only two SSSs I got to learn about, cross-cultural research suggests that SSSs, especially hunter-gatherer societies, tend to have beneficial leadership rooted in reciprocity, collective action, and coordination. We can analyze the contributions and implications of SSS leadership by looking at large-scale societies (LSSs) in industrialized nations that may have more of a globally-recognized political bureaucracy.

Anna Marston

The article discussed six different psychological phenomenons but the one that stood out to me the most was Chicken. In this theory, each side tries to push the other as close as they can to the edge to make them submit first. A game is played that is just like this in which two people drive cars as fast as they can towards one another and the first person to turn away is the chicken. You are trying to push the other person as close to the edge as possible without getting physically harmed. The reason why this stood out to me is because it relates very much so to my term paper. My term paper is on the psychological principles during the cold war and the effect that it had on the war. This phenomenon of chicken was very much so apparent during the Cold War it was all about who was going to blink first/submit first. A prime example of this was when Russian ships approached and crossed the blockade surrounding Cuba. The Russians were playing Chicken with Kennedy trying to get him to make the first move and attack the Rusian fleet but he did not do so. Who was going to make the first move and turn the cold war into a hot war?

Imagine this. You are living in an apartment of four people and out of the four of them two provide all the resources and the other two are free riders. Except, here is the catch. The two free riders aren’t in collaboration but in opposition. The two free riders begin a game of chicken on who can do the least while doing the most and maintain for the most part a free rider lifestyle. This is just one way that the situations described in the article, The Seven Deadly Dilemmas can overlay and intertwine. What is the purpose of knowing the dilemmas? Well, as someone who has lived through the not so imaginary dilemma stated above it can help with a lot of problems solving. However, it beckons the questions why should we care about other people’s concerns if it hinders are? Compromise seems more like an ethical one than a logical one. But, compromise is mandatoy in order to maintain justice and order. 

I found it to be very interesting to learn about the specific types of dilemmas in this reading as most of them were concepts I had never learned before. It was interesting to think about all  these dilemmas because I could think of personal experiences in my daily life where the concepts and situations appear in my interactions with people. I was most intrigued by the concept of the Chicken’s dilemma. I remember I was doing a plank competition with a friend to have the record for the longest time and at one point we both agreed to try to quit and drop at the same time but there wasn’t enough trust and because of that lack of trust aggression showed and at that point someone had to back down and give into what the other person wanted.

My research project is focused on the ethics of climate change, the reading brought me back to a lot of the core ethical problems of my topic. Simply, the idea of free riders is one of the core factors fueling the climate crisis, countries taking advantage of global resources and producing dangerous emissions without taking the steps to properly mitigate! And now we are in a place where countries are free-riding, waiting for another country to create that big carbon tax/ reevaluate the speed of resource usage to reduce emissions. The author writes “threats are useless, though, without credibility,“ today, the threat of the earth becoming inhospitable, oceans rising in temperature and acidity, smog becoming inescapable, etc, are all credible threats according to SCIENCE and the current global environmental state. Will it only be credible when it is too late? When people in the US are experiencing the natural disasters, warming, and smog for themselves? The biggest complicating factor that fuels the free-riding problem is that the emitters don’t see/feel the direct impacts. Like the author says when talking about solutions and change, “coordination is always available to us so long as we can communicate.” The key changing factor here is global communication and effort to make a change, because the countries feeling the impact, are not the countries that are producing the emissions causing the most harm.

The climate crisis solution will require what the author names “opting out” it is even stated that the path of opting out will not provide overwhelming cooperation ( it is impossible that this will be a truly global and cooperative force), but it might help to “avoid the fate of mutual defection in human collective enterprises (by reducing the dominance of there defection strategy).” Which is exactly what we need.

I’ve heard about these theories briefly before, but I thought this article was especially interesting because many of these dilemmas can be applied to my everyday life. I think that whether we notice it or not, we are faced with many of these issues (even if they seem very small and insignificant). For example, if you and your roommate are deciding where to get brunch over the weekend, there are many small decisions happening. On one hand, the Battle of the Sexes can be applied if you both want to go to different places, and you have to come to some sort of agreement in the end. The Chicken Dilemma is also at play, because at some point someone has to back down and give into what the other person wants. Similarly, I think you could also apply the Volunteer Effect, because you hope that your roommate will decide to give up and say that the two of you can go where you really want to go (and vice versa). I think that when you think about all the decision we have to make in the span of a day (especially while we may not think about it), this reading becomes much more prevalent and applicable to our lives.

For me personally, I am much more likely to step up for something if no one else says anything because I feel bad, but it’s interesting to think more deeply about the idea that if you wait out long enough, someone else will step in and you won’t have to. I also think it depends on the situation and who you are with. I am sometimes less likely to step up if I don’t feel comfortable in the group or I know I probably wouldn’t do as good of a job as another person.