I actually had Dr. von Rueden for my leadership 102 class and we discussed a lot of these ideas (our “textbook” was Van Vugt). Perhaps the idea that I have always found most interesting is evolutionary mismatch, or the mismatch hypothesis, which centers around the idea that we sometimes carry over values and leadership traits from small scale societies and apply them to our large scale societies. But this does not always make sense. In the reading, Dr. von Rueden describes how we see stronger, more physically dominant people as leaders of the military and wars. Another example we talked about in my 102 class is the focus that we place of political leaders’ personal lives. For example, in a small scale society, it makes sense to value and pay attention to a leader’s personal life. However, why does that carry over to a large scale society? Does it matter if Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky? If he is a good leader, why does his personal life matter to us? Another example of the mismatch hypothesis is fear. For example, evolutionary mismatch explains why we still fear spiders and insects but not cars, which have killed and harmed thousands more than spiders.<\/p>\n
I found his evolutionary explanation about gender very interesting. In class, we discussed how men have evolved to take on more leadership roles in SSS and why they are viewed as leaders. Women tend to build a smaller social network with people that they trust. This is mainly due to the idea that they take care of offspring and need trustworthy individuals to help them with these tasks (mutual aid). Men, on the other hand, tend to build bigger social networks in order to compete for resources, mates, and more. On page 981 of the reading, it states that “emergent leaders tend to be hubs of social networks.” This is one train of reasoning that can explain why men tend to emerge more as leaders in SSS than women; pairing this idea with the idea that physical size signals leadership in SSS also strengthens this idea.<\/p>\n
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I actually had Dr. von Rueden for my leadership 102 class and we discussed a lot of these ideas (our “textbook” was Van Vugt). Perhaps the idea that I have always found most interesting is evolutionary mismatch, or the mismatch hypothesis, which centers around the idea that we sometimes carry over values and leadership traits […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4683,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4683"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}