Modern Wisdom - #545 - Chris Von Rueden - How Did Human Leadership Evolve?

Episode Date: October 29, 2022

Chris von Rueden is an anthropologist and Associate Professor at the University of Richmond who researches how humans form status hierarchies and the evolution of human cooperation. We take it for granted that there are leaders in modern society. Presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens. Hierarchies are baked into our world, but what did leadership look like in an ancestral environment and why did it evolve in the first place? Expect to learn the two ways that primitive leaders could command respect from a group, why followership evolved at all in humans, why the Female Leadership Paradox exists, how leadership and hierarchies change as group size increases, whether leaders are altruistic or selfish and much more... Sponsors: Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on the amazing 6 Minute Diary at https://bit.ly/diarywisdom (use code MW15) (USA - https://amzn.to/3b2fQbR and use 15MINUTES) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Chris' website - https://sites.google.com/site/chrisvonrueden/home  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Chris Von Ruden. He's an anthropologist and associate professor at the University of Richmond to research his how humans form status hierarchies and the evolution of human cooperation. We take it for granted that there are leaders in modern society, presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens, hierarchies are baked into our world. But what did leadership look like in an ancestral environment and why did it evolve in the first place? Expect to learn the two ways that primitive

leaders could command respect from a group. Why follow a ship evolved at all in humans? Why the female leadership paradox even exists? How leadership and hierarchies change as group-size increases, whether leaders are altruistic or selfish, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Chris Von Ruden. What would you say are the interesting evolution questions about human leadership? Well, first, you know, asking an evolutionary question about leadership, perhaps, presumes that it was selected for so that we've evolved some kind of motivation to adopt leadership or followership as members of groups.

And I think, you know, the research on that is still ongoing. And so it would sort of require that over evolutionary history and ancestral human societies, individuals that had such motivations to adopt leadership or followership, I mean, it takes two to tago there. They their reproductive success was improved or being just being members of a group in which leadership and fallership was happening enabled their groups to perform other groups. But taking an evolutionary perspective requires us to think about

evolutionary time skills where what's leadership and followership adaptive, particularly the specific kinds and unique kinds of leadership and followership that humans engage in. Because leadership is fairly ubiquitous across social species, but there are some unique properties to human leadership. How so, what like? us unique properties to human leadership. How so, what like? Well, I think first, there's a lot of sort of so-called active leadership in humans, where leaders will talk directly to other group members to try and get individuals to coordinate, use rhetoric, various other communication strategies to directly influence the behavior of others

in their group. Now, you see instances of that in other species, but I think the majority of leadership in other species, and perhaps the majority of leadership in humans, too, might be more passive. So it's sort of one individual, does some kind of action, and other members of the group observe that, and this side, it's in their interest to do the same. So it's not like that one leader has actively communicated with other individuals to get them to do something. Like a lion decides that we're going to try and go after this particular thing and everybody else that's in that pride goes after it as well. Exactly. Yeah, that's a good example.

Okay. Exactly. Yeah, that's a good example. Okay. I think humans do that too, but I mean, I think when we use the word leadership, we're often thinking more of the active kind, where I'm directing you or giving you explicit instructions or things like that. Okay. That is more rare, I think. And that's a function of the fact that we can communicate more deeply, I guess, that we can hold different levels of hierarchy within our minds, that people can be statusful at scavenging or communicating or fighting or whatever, whereas I guess if you're a lion, are you big and powerful? Yes, no. Yeah, I think, I mean, maybe what you're bringing up is division of labor. If you're in a group, there might be some people with some skills that are better than others. And if solving some group goal or problem can benefit from

a division of labor, certain people do some tasks and others do others, leadership can help coordinate all that. And so that kind of division of labor with coordinated by leadership really rare. And I think that, but that is what makes humans and human groups so incredible at solving problems and innovating. I suppose that that's a reason that leadership would be more important. Like, if you have all of these different divisions working, you need somebody that is outside of the divisions to be able to bring them together to coordinate them toward a common goal. Exactly. And even that aspect of understanding that there's a common goal, I think it's not that common across species either. I think humans are really good at, I can understand that you have the same goal that I have.

Even if that requires you to engage in some slightly different behavior than me, we both have some abstract notion of what the end goal will be. And so there's other things that I think it's not just about leadership, but about some other aspects of our psychology and our cooperativeness that come into play here. But certainly leadership is it can be the sort of glue that brings it together. What are the elements coming into play? Just our propensity to cooperate with others who are especially those who are not related to. And our ability to just understand what other people are thinking really well, such that I can create some mental representation of a goal that I know you share as well. Our ability to communicate through language. Yeah, all these other things are important. Why is it that humans have evolved to coordinate

with people that aren't part of their genetic kin? That's a huge research program on that. A lot of people will point to reciprocity where it pays to sort of help somebody if they'll help you back. But that's, there's sort of trouble with reciprocity according to various models in scaling up to, not just cooperating with non-kin, but in large groups with non-kin. Reputation is another mechanism that might be really important, so humans care a lot about

reputation. This relates to leadership and fallorship as well. And so we're motivated to cooperate with individuals who may not know well or are related to because it has ramifications for how other people might treat us in the future. Or responding to punishment and reward. Also can be a factor. So yeah, other, you know, more controversially perhaps

others have argued group selection might play a role in human cooperatives, meaning ancestral groups of humans that were more cooperative, outcompeted other groups, and then their descendants were, as a result, more cooperative by inheriting whatever traits led to the cooperatives in the first place. Why would it be more rare in the animal kingdom and yet prevalent in humans? Does that suggest

that humans have got more complex challenges that we need to face than other animals do? to? Yeah, I think this is, you know, largely speculative, still understanding how all this happened. I like to think that a key was a transition to a hunting and gathering kind of ecology, where ancestral humans started going after food that was harder to get, that placed selection on greater intelligence but also greater cooperatives because getting after food that's harder to get, you have to dig up or hunt down or scavenge, it sometimes requires cooperation just in the act of pursuing those foods. Or you know, you could pursue it individually but you might come home home at the handed, such that you're gonna wanna share with somebody

who could help you, and then another day, they might come home at the handed, and you could share with them. So I think this transition to hunting and gathering was probably key to the shift to gritter cooperativeness, greater communicative ability, greater intelligence, lots of things. What ends up determining who becomes

a leader? Are you able to predict this? Yeah, so there's a lot of long-standing debate in psychology about the traits versus situations. And in our groups, other particular things like personality or intelligence or even things like body size that are more likely to cause certain individuals to step forward as leaders. There's an interesting recent paper that found one of the key things to predict leadership is our willingness to make decisions that have consequences for others, even where we're not certain what those consequences might be. Those people that are sort of less anxious about making decisions that impact others, whether it's uncertainty, are more likely to emerge as leaders. So there are lots of traits, but also situations matter tremendously.

So, you know, for example, group members tend to, there's a lot of evidence group members in facing threats, external threats to the group, will tend to look to individuals to help coordinate who have some signs of being more dominant in their personality. And so that's been, you know, these interesting experiments that ask people to choose a leader and they're showing an array of faces and they're given different situations. And in situations where people are supposedly members of a group that are being confronted with some other group that's attacking them, people tend to prefer faces of leaders that look more dominant or have more sort of masculine

allies kind of faces. This is tricky, but there's some suggestion that, you know, to the extent, and sexually in their smaller groups, individuals who had more dominant traits in face-to-face groups could more, sort of, maybe efficiently or rapidly coordinate others or were more able to implement punishment as incentive to get people to contribute. But that dominant kinds of individuals or traits that are related to dominance comes with risk that those kinds of leaders might exploit you. So there's this sort of trade off, right?

That can be situation dependent. When a group's facing existential threats, maybe you're less likely to worry about pursuing a more kind of dominant leader. Other times, you might want to avoid that. Yes, if you end up locking in a tyrant just because you had a brief period of conflict, that's going to be bad long term. What are some of the similarities that we have with other animals? Are there certain traits that do seem to be pretty scalable,

pretty similar across different animal groups in ourselves? So related to this, the potential contribution of dominance related traits, cues to body size or strength, or more aggressive kind of personality, in other animals, sometimes leadership is tied to the dominance hierarchy. So who is at the top of the dominance hierarchy is more likely to lead groups to new directions,

or to act as conflict mediators within groups. So you see that in other primates that dominant individuals will sometimes break up fights. So that, you know, and then still looking in humans, yeah, to the extent we have these preferences for individuals that have traits conducive to dominance, preferences for them as leaders, and that has some sort of homology

with the way that dominance can contribute to leadership and other primates and other animals. But there's lots of leaders and other animals that are not high in the dominance hierarchy. All right, that individuals that might have some specialized kind of knowledge, or are first to move, and this is getting back to this sort of passive kind of leadership and rest of the group just sort of wants to do the same thing. So, you know, and so boldness, right kind of personality of sort of bold personalities irrespective of their location, the dominant hierarchy can lead to leadership and other animals. And so you see that in humans too,

it's not. And especially in humans given that we are much better able to keep dominance from exploding us by acting collectively to keep dominant individuals so that we might prefer individuals to have some kind of dominant like traits in certain situations to help lead, coordinate, but we're also very suspicious of that, and able to act collectively to take them down if needs be. What's the difference between status hierarchies and leadership then? Does someone just in a human society rise up through the status hierarchy and then get popped out of the top as a leader

or is there a relationship between the two at all? I think status hierarchy is like access to resources. So who gets more, who gets less? But it can be tricky because leadership itself could be a contested resource. Like, because if gaining access to leadership gets you access to resources or reputation that improves your mating opportunities or anything else like that, then leadership itself becomes sort of much more tied to the state's hierarchy. But leadership I would define as a differential influence in a group. And so having more influence over

individual's behavior and pursuit of some collective goal. So it's distinct from your location than the status hierarchy, but leadership can be the kinds of things individuals compete over or how individuals act as leaders can influence subsequently their status. Presumably, the leaders would be some of the highest status people within

a group as well. In humans, often yes, but not necessarily. So I think our political leaders are in a large scale societies. Very good example. Very good example. Yeah. Very good example. Yeah. Right. What about the differences in traits for leadership in men and women? How do they compete intracexually differently for that? Yeah, I mean, that's a mind field of an issue. I think I'm of the persuasion that men and women can be as effective as leaders, that gender per se doesn't really matter in terms of leadership effectiveness. But there might be some subtle things that influence how men and women lead, right?

So that are related to our evolutionary history. So to the extent that men are more willing to compete using safe physical violence, or to take outsized risks that can negatively impact health and safety, then as a product of our sexual selection and processes that are other animals like humans have experienced that can create average differences in behavior across males and females. That would mean that on average, then sort of male and female leadership in humans might have a certain slightly different tenor, and that at the least would suggest we don't want, we would want lots of women in leadership and not just men, not just for the sake of equity,

for its own sake, but that there might be slightly different approaches to leadership that would be any sort of organization or country or business would benefit from. Slightly different approaches to risk taking on average, approaches to coalition building. And so, yeah, I think leadership by men and women is largely the similar, but there can be on these average

small differences that might matter on average. What about the costs and the benefits of leadership and fellowship? Because I think, I don't know, when people watch movies that have got a really strong lead in it that they find themselves identifying with, you start to think, well, that would be me. I would be the guy that's the gladiator

or the Spartacus or whatever to the front of it, but it's not just all positives presumably and also fellowship isn't just all negatives. So what are some of the costs and the benefits of both of those? Right, so can have 20 cooks in the kitchen or else nothing gets made. I think that's what you're looting to is also, you can't have everybody be a follower, and then nothing else, nothing gets done either. So, they're cost, and so that's right there is some of the benefits of actually being a follower

are that you're a member of a group that is actually accomplishing something. You're able to achieve goals as a member of a group compared to other groups that have too many people of buying for leadership or too too few people lying for leadership. Benefits to fallorship also include less or reputational costs from not achieving group goals where there's all you're not on the hook

for the performance as much. Right. And at the same time, you're maybe gaining experience to in the future become a leader. That's another potential benefit. So yeah. I think we are all, you know, I don't see any people born leaders or followers rather than we have psychology that sort of ways our individual attributes, the situations we're in, the other members of our group, how they compare to us, and we're constantly kind of adjusting who we're deferring to or our own sort of motivations to try and get influence others in strategic

ways that sometimes consciously, sometimes not. So I don't think we're either leaders or followers, but these costs and benefits play out very dynamically depending upon how we assess ourselves relative to others and our groups and relatives to the situations we find ourselves in. The situation part is really interesting, thinking about the fact that you might have someone who would be a great leader in one particular type of ecology or situation, and then 50 years later, something completely different has happened, and that would be the worst person to choose.

Somebody that's super risk taking at a time when you need to be sort of bold and decisive, someone that's super conservative when things are going badly and you actually need to make some changes. All of these different elements. Yeah, that's very interesting. That's something I hadn't considered. Yeah, and it relates back to that discussion of this interesting preferences that individuals

have for dominant kinds of traits when their group space, sort of existential kinds of issues. Those same individuals at other times would not be famous leaders. What are the dynamics that are important for regulating that leader follower relationship? Because, you know, you often hear about the tumultuous and precarious leader that is oppressive, the tyrant that's keeping everybody down, but what are the important metrics that are mediating that? I think he is the size of the leader's coalition. So if they have a big enough coalition that is benefiting from their leadership, that can do the trick.

But I think the more democratic you get, or the smaller the group size, such that leaders really have to convince most group members of their benefits. I think he is leader's ability to display what's called procedural fairness that they're acting in the interests of group benefits. I think key is leaders ability to display, what's called procedural fairness, that they're acting in the interests of group members. So even if outcomes, leaders outcomes are, the outcomes of their decisions are not sort of benefiting anybody equally.

So long as people have perceived the leaders are trying to treat everybody in the group fairly, then that's key for leaders gaining legitimacy and keeping their positions. I think as members of groups, we're always a lookout for leaders acting in ways that betray self-efficientists or that's not regarding others, other group members as equal partners in a sort of a group project. We're so quick to want to jump on leaders that do things that betray, yeah, kind of selfishness that maybe they're not displaying most of the time.

I think that explains a lot of our fascination with like in politics, the fares of politicians or when politicians say things that appeared to contradict what they had said earlier, we're constantly in the lookout for leaders that might be potentially acting not in our interests. Is that because the impact of a leader that wasn't acting in our interests would be so outsized that it's super important that our radar is hyper attuned to whether or not they are. Yeah, we just don't want to be cheated, I think.

We don't want leaders to get more than they deserve or for them to like lead the groups in directions that will primarily benefit them and not the rest of the group. Also, I think there's been some discussion of the why, the fact that we talk about these things, do we communicate about our leaders as a means of us potentially establishing the collective action against that leader, should they, year she act in selfish ways. So we're not only just sort of trying to figure out

as individuals, our leaders benefiting us or acting selfishly So we're not only just sort of trying to figure out as individuals, are leaders benefiting us or acting selfishly, we're also communicating about this others that can serve as a coordinated device. Oh, did you see what that leader did the other day? To help, you know, in the instance we need to act against that leader, we can do so by rallying around some kind of thing they did. Oh, okay. So that's the gossiping behind the leaders back or the discussing after the presidential debate, candidate debate or whatever. That serves a number of functions.

It probably stress tests your interpretation of how that went. I thought that he looked really disingenuous. Did you think that he looked disingenuous? It probably starts to create early coalitions in case you need to do something to push back against someone that it also would create a coalition that says, I really liked what he said there

about the going to get the berries tomorrow or whatever, like I feel like we should support it. Might be in some way, should go and get the berries for ages. Yeah, that's really interesting. To consider that the gossip, and then we should go and get the barriers for ages. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. To consider that the gossip, especially about the leader serves a purpose,

that is like externalizing a stress test about whether or not they are playing that fairness and cheetah detection game. And also, maybe other members of the group, disagree with you about whether the leader's acting selfishly, so you're saying that stress tests is Can I get other people to potentially coordinate with me against the leader? Let's see, right? So yeah, I suppose as well

that would suggest that leadership which is primarily done through like very heavy dominance is going to be a little bit more fragile. If you don't ever allow dissent in a relatively small group, then people are eventually going to find a way, you're gonna squeeze it so hard that it's gonna come out the sides and people are gonna find a way to have a discussion outside of earshot of you and your goons.

And then eventually those people are gonna rally together and then get rid of you. Right, but the hard part is when you steal your goons your goons, right, is key because I don't think there's any pure dominance. You know, leaders can't act purely in the basis of dominance, meaning like trying to dominate everybody else. That will work. You know, you need two or three people and then they can physically overwhelm an individual.

It's always the size of that dominant individual's coalition. Can they provide enough benefits to those coalition members that can then enable them to to act more dominantly towards everybody else But once your your coalition falls apart, then you're done So yes, yeah, isn't there there's something similar to this to do with chimpanzees as well Right the chimpanzees can band together and then it doesn't matter how big any one chimpanzee any three other chimps can pretty much just rip them limb from limb. Yeah, similar politics. I think, but I think what makes humans different is that we are much better able to form really large coalitions, often with non-kin, and can use them to overthrow the existing hierarchy. Rather than like a lot of those chimps, sort of political coalitions are often just at the top of the hierarchy, this sort of, you know, second, third, fourth ranking males may be coming together trying

to work without the top ranking male. Rather than, you know, the whole bottom three quarters of the group coming together simultaneously having the shared goal, maybe there's even leadership amidst, you know, within that bottom three quarters emerging to orchestrate coordinate to overthrow the top quarter, that's I think really an equally human. What, is there anything else that you see in modern politics that is a interesting reflection of an evolutionary adaptation that you think

that we've got when it comes to our relationship to leaders and thus scrutiny and skepticism of them? Yeah. that we've got when it comes to our relationship to leaders and thus scrutiny and skepticism of them. Yeah. So yeah, I think our outsize attention to leaders' personal lives as sort of means of trying to assess, oh, are they doing things that might be selfish? I think there are other things that reflect maybe

our evolutionary history of cooperating and leading in smaller groups that we see play out in our large-scale societies. Like the way we organize our leader-follow relationships, and often in these tiered hierarchies, we create these bureaucracies that sort of have tiered structures. In a sense, our sort of recreating smaller groups at each level with face-to-face leadership and fallorship.

But those groups are embedded within larger groups and embedded within larger groups. Oh yeah, okay. So you're saying that the fact that you would have a a Senate and within the Senate, there's still a degree of hierarchy within that and then downstream from the Senate, you've got the people that they enact and then downstream from that and downstream. So you're nesting small groups that have more power and then it scales up and up and up until the one person at the top. Right, military hierarchy similarly, any sort of business is structured that way, larger the larger they get, the more likely the adoptees nested hierarchies.

I think because it facilitates this face-to-face leader faller interaction within groups as well, but in ways that can help then coordinate decision-making throughout the much larger group. I suppose to say several thousand people are part of some business with no hierarchy, with no hierarchy, all sort of just reporting to one and a liter. You know, really tricky. Yes, yes, because how would you be able to, there's no coalition ability, it's just one huge big soup of people that you're all getting.

Okay. Is there anything for us to learn about leadership from non-mammal animals. I always think about bees and ants and stuff and you've got the queen within this. But I never really hear any parallels drawn between insects and humans. Is that because their development is so different to ours that basically we're talking about an entirely different, not only species, not only lineage, but it might as well be a different world. In some senses I'd say that they have these kind of large colonies that are

with all kinds of incredible self-sacrifice that you don't see in humans. And coordination among thousands of individuals that's happening really fluidly without any obvious bureaucracy, right? There might be a queen, but a queen's not actively directing things. At the same time, there's also evidence of leadership happening in terms of implementing punishments and rewards. So there are some I think ant species where there's been shown where workers are cheap by trying to reproduce their own eggs. You'll see in some species the queen will come and as of target those you know individuals for like, I think that's the execution. Yeah, I can't remember what it was.

If it's not, if it's just like eating the eggs that they produced or doing something else to the actual ants that did that, there are other worker ants that will take on that punishment role. So, yeah, they're not just sort of like, you know, the Borg, but can engage in these sort of smaller inter-individual dynamics that involve punishment and reward. So that might be some kind of. Yeah, I learned from Joe Henrik about gerontocracies.

And I'd never heard about those before. Have you looked at these? In humans? Yes. Yeah. So there are smaller scale societies, hunter-gatherers, particularly in Australia. There's several gerontocracies where

it's the oldest of the old males who are highly polygamous and are sort of lead the sort of rituals of the group. And what's really interesting about that is that these are hunter-gatherers, a lot of these gerontocracies. And so often, hunter-gatherers, you tend to see less pronounced hierarchy, less polygamy, because there's not a lot of wealth for individuals to monopolize. And when there's societies get wealthier, you often see males will monopolize that wealth,

form coalitions to defend it and enhance their opportunities for polygene. So that you see this in hunter-gatherers without a lot of wealth, it's really interesting these gerontocracies. And so leadership there, yeah, it's concentrating to the older men. I don't know what context did you discuss? I was just, that was him.

I found it interesting that he mentioned young male syndrome is super prevalent in these particular types of groups, which is you have all of these young guys who have got high testosterone and no family and no partner. So why don't they just run around and cause mischief and stuff like that. And he mentioned that they're inherently unstable, but then how would they ever stick about? You'd only ever see them for a couple of generations and then they'd change. So there must be some degree of stability. It was in a mating context to do with the fact that these older guys capture basically all of the women. And in order for the younger men to be able to mate,

there's decades worth of ritual and process and right of passage after right of passage, after something else that they gotta go through and then eventually finally they get to earn the rights to mate. I figured that it must be super fragile and unstable. Yeah, I think the ways of mitigating that problem are when you create sort of men's organizations that are creep bonds between these older and the younger men

and sort of show the younger men, oh, there's a pipeline where you can, you know, with age and time and demonstrating your value to the community, you will get to be where I am. And often, you know, those often emerge in more world-lex societies, so Warford becomes that vehicle for the younger men to establish themselves. But with these gerontocracies in Australia, it's much more tenuous, I'd say, because you don't have these strong men's organizations.

You don't have, there's, there's war, there's some degree of warfare though. And this, you know, one thing maybe helps is, as you just said, a lot of ritualization. So I don't know, it's an ongoing debate. But there is variation within these Australian hunter-gatherers that was documented by anthropologists. And so you do see, there is some evidence that there are higher rates of polygyny, the gerontocracies more pronounced in those aborigines that were living closer to the coast with sort of denser resources and where resources could be more controlled. So in a sense it is there is some. Oh, that's because if the resources were less available, you would need to have everybody on side.

You would have to have everybody working together as opposed to going against you. Why is that the case? Why is it? Yeah. One, it could reduce the need for cooperation across individuals into the sharing resources. Secondly, whether wealth is more monopolizable, you can defend certain fisheries or productive soils or something or parcels of land. Those that can do that well can enforce, say, polygene, enforce their leadership on others. And so, yeah, there's that variation within these sort of degenerantocratics societies where the more defensible the resources, the more polygene you see, the more intense the gerontocracy.

You've mentioned that. So, about the relationship between local ecology and the way that hierarchy, group structure, leadership gets deployed. What is there to know there? Because I didn't realize until reading your work about just how much of this is influenced, local resources, about just how much risk there is from outside groups, all of that stuff. I think he is the biggest key I think is group size. So how a collegey shapes group size is huge.

So why leadership at all? It's just help solve coordination and collective action problems. Groups face trying to solve these problems. They can break down just because people are able to coordinate well or, you know, accomplishing group goals can break down because enough people are cheating or free riding on the whole, on the everybody else. So those problems just get worse as groups get bigger. And so if you're in a ecology with lots of plan

of resources that enables populations to grow, you can get more conflicts, more coordination failure, more free riding that might create demand for leaders to help resolve those issues. And group members might even want to endow leaders with certain rights and responsibilities, formalized rights and responsibilities as groups get larger. So group size is one huge thing that is also dependent upon the larger ecology.

But then also this was just referencing with the in Australia, the more that there are defensible resources, the more that certain lineages, coalitions, family units can control and defend resources and then impose a sort of hierarchy on others by controlling access to valued resources. What would an example of defensible resources be? resources. What would an example of defensible resources be? So productive fishery, like a salmon run, I mentioned that because you see there are hunter-gatherers in the Pacific Northwest that are well well studied because they had inherited chiefdoms, so chiefdom ships were inherited. They had slavery on these were hunter-gatherers.

But the reason that we think that they had such intense hierarchies, a lot of really formalized coercive leadership is because those leaders and their families controlled access to the best fishing sites. controlled access to the best fishing sites. And so that whole sort of the way that resources can be controlled and used to benefit you and yourself and your kin, I think is another channel in addition to group size that can influence the extent of hierarchies and the way it can extend to which leadership is formalized and even given coercive Or hat takes on coercive kind of properties because if the resources were indefensible Then how would you be able to coerce people could leave more freely?

They would be able to go and do what they wanted but that's also part of it I mean if you can leave then you can you leave so it requires Resources being defensible and they're not being great exit options. People are going to stick around because they're like, yeah, I'm not doing as well as other people in this group, but it's better than leaving. So that exit option is also important. So I think in the grant scheme of things,

that defensible of resources is really much more powerful in driving up the degree of coercive leadership. But that, you know, also the effect of group size matters a lot too. And just, you know, societies and communities benefiting from leadership and higher and sort of the differentiation of leaders and followers can also go up with larger groups. So yeah, there's a lot of ways in which I think ecology matters. Does that mean that more defensible resources and generally more resources overall increases inequality within the group? Yeah, typically. Yeah, I think that there's that tendency over human history, you know,

where the wealthier groups become, the more likely you are to see certain individuals monopolize, surplus production or monopolize the resource base that generates that wealth. So, yeah, I think that's, I think, barely the case that, you know, decided to get richer. It's just, you know, automatically is definitely a distributed across everybody. Yeah. Why suppose that's a kind of an obvious, an obvious question

that if there isn't a surplus, what are you going to capture in order to be able to create an inequality? If everybody is living a hand to mouth, there is only the exact amount that you need in order to perhaps a little bit less than the amount that you need in order to be able to survive, nobody can start to store anything. Everybody's just doing what they can to get by. Yeah, I suppose. I mean, that's one of the main things that I learned from Sapiens, right, by you've all know a Harari about the fact that up until whatever 15,000 years ago, there's no opportunity for people to have massive amounts of inequality because there's no one here enough

surplus resources. Yeah, yeah, I I mean sometimes these coordination collective action problems or cyclical increases in group size that might have occurred in hunter gathers might increase demand for more formalized leadership to help resolve problems of coordination and collective action. But really to really kick that up and make

that a more permanent, especially coercive kind of leadership, you really need the defensible resources where there's surplus production that can be defended and used to benefit you and your coalition. What does that, how do you relate that to the current way that we look at leadership in the modern world? Is there something to be said about compartmentalized, secretive information about us not feeling a degree of transparency between what we know that our leaders are doing and our awareness of it and stuff like that? Is there any, it feels like there might be some sort of a crossover there?

It's strange in our society where I think most people hugely underestimate levels of wealth inequality and whether that wealth inequality is justified or not, I think we tend to see what's around us so that we compare ourselves to our neighbors or our co-workers. I think that tends to be our unit of analysis as the compare ourselves to our neighbors or our co-workers. I think that tends to be our unit of analysis, as the people who are encountering face-to-face. I think where we truly concerned about, you know, our country is a whole and the distribution of wealth, you know, it might be better served by a clear understanding of just how wealth is distributed. And I think most people are not aware of the level of inequality.

Do you think that that's the same both ways round? Do you think that people that are incredibly poor are unaware of the people that are incredibly wealthy? Yeah, but probably, but to the extent that, you know, we see urban environments really concentrate extreme power and extreme wealth, maybe thick people in urban environments have a better sense of things. Yes, actually, because you're driving past or watching people drive past as you are someone. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so what do you think in your opinion, do you think that

leaders are altruistic or selfish? Are they motivated by the desire to help or the desire for power? I think you can answer that at a more proximate level and a more ultimate level, so proximately do leaders take on leadership roles because they really feel like they're being altruistic and helping the group. Or they're doing it for selfish motivations and like they have designs to actually enrich themselves and and then at an ultimate level, you know, you could explain even that supposedly, you know consciously Autouristic motivation on the part of leaders in terms of you know Having that kind of motivation over evolutionary timescales might have been profitable,

adaptive, because it enhanced your reproductive success. So that's something I've shown that some of my research even in small scale, relatively egalitarian hunter gathers, individuals that have higher status, including have taken on leadership positions or have greater influence and community decision-making, tend to experience greater reproductive success. And so, you know, at an ultimate level, perhaps that more, that pro-social motivation of leaders can be explained by the sort of ways that that actually

tended to generate positive reputations, increase your status, that kind of thing. Now, even in case where leaders take a huge pay cut or do things like that, to what extent are they still benefiting otherwise, terms of reputation or, you know, in other ways? Yeah, and I think especially in the modern world, and presumably this would have been reflected unsastirably as well, if you go through a period of being the leader, as long as you don't leave disgraced, you have generated a ton of goodwill and, like, how do you say, vestigial renown that you can carry with you until the rest

of time. So yeah, even though right now for the next eight years, Mr. President, you will be paid this small amount of money, you know, you are given an unbelievable amount of opportunities on the other side of that. I mean, Nick Clegg, who is the former co-prime minister of the UK only within the last 10 years is now the global communications director or something for Facebook and he's involved in all manner of other bits and pieces. So yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the interesting insights that you talked about there is this relationship between status and mating success.

What did you learn there other than more status is probably good for mating success? I think because in a lot of the smaller scale hunter-gatherer societies are often different frame as being egalitarian and a lot of them very are fiercely egalitarian where people who brag or try and coerce others are rapidly put down group members will act against them.

At the same time, having a kind of, displaying a kind of humble leadership and providing, being generous, can lead to you getting these kind of, especially among men, getting these kind of, especially among men, mating benefits. And so, yeah, it just suggests that there are motivations for gaining influence in any human society, right? In any society, no matter how egalitarian, there is hierarchy, however subtle, however camouflage that produces,

can produce these reproductive variation. Maybe not in a lot of modern scale societies with contraception, with socially imposed monogamy, smaller family sizes in general, but at least the evidence that I've gathered to suggest that, you know, ancestral even in relatively gallaturian societies is likely the case that influence leadership had reproductive benefits on aggregate. Yeah, so you might end up with better mating success in the modern world, but not necessarily translate that into reproductive success with some of the boundaries that we've placed in between the the the act and the outcome. Or even maybe maybe maybe not even mating success either. But what you do have is that reputation

that maybe, essentially, would have translated more readily into mating success and reproductive success. So people still choose to seek it regardless of whether or not it's going to cause. Okay, yeah, that's interesting. What about, if it was a female leader or a female that had a lot of dominance, did you ever look at the relationship between female status and reproductive success? Yeah, there's not as much good evidence there. In part because a lot of male influence and politicking is just much more obvious than overt than women sort of politicking and coalition formation and that kind of thing.

Also you pronounce gender divisions of labor, especially in smaller scale societies like I work with. And so, yeah, what evidence I do have of women's status in terms of popularity or influence, there is some evidence that it's more women translate that status more into child survival and sort of family welfare on average relative to males. Not that males don't do that, but that women are more likely to, and in comparison, men are more likely to translate their status into mating opportunity relative to women. Not that women don't do that, but you know, they're these slight average differences. And so what evidence I have seen,

clinging to some I've done with the group I work with in the Amazon, is that motives suggest motivations for acquiring status and specifically for requiring leadership might differ on average across the sexes. But there are lots of motivations for acquiring leadership, but this fundamental sort of mating motive might differ. Yeah. Is there a difference in mating success when status is taken from dominance compared with when status is taken from prestige?

Good question. So I did find some evidence in the group I work with in the Amazon that status based more on dominance related to fighting ability impacts, we'll have success just like status related to sort of like freely accorded influence that people gave to somebody, they perceived as prestigious, that in both cases, this was a study of men, men had greater mating success and more extramarital affairs as well.

But for, I think there is a difference though in terms of agent marriage. So the root you get to that mating success differs where I think it was, and I could be confusing this, but the more procedures individuals are more likely to get married at younger ages. And so there is some slight variation there, but nothing I would hang my hat on. Got you. What about the sex ratio? How does the sex ratio within a group change roots to power? Dominance versus prestige is being the tools that are being used. Are there any other interesting things about the sex ratio? Yeah.

So, that's a good question. Something I want to think more about. I think what's known about sex ratio effects on our behavior suggests that many, whether there's many more men, you can get greater competition among men, because there's more competition for mating opportunity. At the same time, there's also events that with you have a lot more men.

When men do form partnerships with women, they're much more likely to be respectful and less domestic violence and because they're sort of, the fact that if you lose that partner, you're then out in the sort of mating game again. So it's really risky. the fact that if you lose that partner, you're then out in the sort of baining game again. So it's really risky.

I think where men are in the minority, you get men are more willing to pursue shorter term mating goals. They can drive that, the mating market because they're sort of in, they have greater influence given their small numbers. So I think yeah, to the extent when the sex ratio is skewed more towards women, there are few men and men's mating goals can predominate in the sort of mating market. Men might be more likely to pursue leadership and status for those aims, particularly, to just enhance their meaning opportunity, perhaps even more explicitly.

That might be a prediction, I'd make. That's interesting. What would be a reason, ancestrally about why there would be a skew in the sect ratio at all? Like, many women, it ish, are born at around about 50, 50. Yeah.

What would be some of the things that would have caused there to be a significant skew in that? Could you think? Hi rates of homicide. Bruce that, especially given that homicide is more likely to involve males and females. So there are there were skewed sex ratios, for example, in inuit populations where adult males were likely to die, violent death, and then there's also infanticide that also affects things. So because of the males were more like, I don't death, there was also a lot of female infanticantasy because males were valued producers and were more rare.

You could get this skewed sex ratio where there are many more men that can then exacerbate the male-male conflicts later in life and perpetuate that. So women would have, after birth, disposed of a female baby. Right. Wow. So those are two main mechanisms, I think, as adult mortality and then in fantasied early in life, we're selective by gender. Would into group conflict play a role here?

Would there be a potential of, I guess, a proliferation of women might be if your tribe went and killed all of the men in another tribe and then took all of those women I don't know how common that would be I mean I think the frequency of warfare in hunter-gatherers and especially an ancestral human hunter-gatherers is debated Certainly homicides are frequent but Yeah, I think I think my view is that warfare has played a selection pressure

in human psychology for, you know, long time. And yeah, to the extent that can create skewed local sex ratios, you know, because our psychology does respond to differences in sex ratio, it suggests that, essentially, we experience variation in sex ratio. Ah, that is so interesting. So we would have to come from somewhere. Yes, dude, I love that. I love that insight. I love the fact that the only reason that we're able to respond to this is because previously

we would have been exposed to it. I mean, you could argue some kind of like, well, you could reason your, you know, you find yourself in some sex ratio and you could sort of use some kind of logic or reason to suggest, oh, I made sure I should adapt my mating psychology now. I'm persuaded that evolution has shaped our psychology such that it's responsive by design to a variation sex ratio.

Dude, that is really, really cool. Look, Chris, Von Roeden, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they go on the internet? Google Chris Von Roeden, look from my Google sites website, they got some papers and talks and public circular articles and stuff up there, so look from there. Chris, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you.