How do we choose our leaders? An evolutionary approach.

How do we choose our leaders? The Spanish broadcaster Eduardo Punset tackled this question with the evolutionary social psychologist Mark van Vugt of the University of Kent in his programme Redes (“Networks”). (For those of you who understand Spanish, I’ve inserted the video of the interview. If you want to read the interview in Spanish, the transcript is here). Among the many ideas discussed, I found the following especially interesting:

• Who comes first, the leader or the followers? In the animal kingdom, it’s the followers who come first. To increase their chances of survival, animals stick together in a group. When the strongest animal goes in search of water or food, the rest follow it. According to van Vugt, leadership among humans developed in a similar way: first came the followers, then the leader.

• We can identify three types of leadership on the evolutionary ladder. First we have “democratic leadership” which existed in hunter-gatherer societies around 2.5 million years ago. In this type of society there was no overall leader. Instead, there were different leaders according to the “area of expertise”: war, hunting, etc. Next appeared the phenomenon of hereditary leadership, around 10,000 years ago. Hereditary leadership was typical in societies based on farming, and led to the creation of a monarchy and aristocracy which passed from one generation to the next. Finally we come to the concept of leadership prevalent in more “developed” countries today, where followers have much more freedom than before and demand leaders who are closer to them. This type of leadership shares certain characteristics with leadership in hunter-gatherer societies.

• In the opinion of van Vugt, we choose female leaders when we want someone to smooth over conflicts, and male leaders when we are more interested in protection and defence from outside threats. This paradigm makes it difficult for women to become leaders of countries (as was the case with Hilary Clinton, according to van Vugt). This male/female dichotomy is based on attitudes we had in the past but, unfortunately, it still influences our way of thinking today. (As an aside, we usually choose older politicians in times of stability and younger politicians in times of change, so Obama got the slogan of his campaign right!)

• Finally, studies in companies have shown that leaders who are chosen by their colleagues demonstrate the same qualities as the leaders of our distant ancestors: they are reliable, trustworthy, not overly ambitious, and, interestingly, taller. I will elaborate on these ideas in another post.

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