ArticleHuman nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.)2019
Evolutionary Models of Leadership : Tests and Synthesis.
Article in Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- 100 generations of wealth equality after the Neolithic transitions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Expression of prestige through authentic pride, not dominance through hubristic pride, promotes fairness in ultimatum bargaining.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- How to solve the problem of inherited behavior patterns and increase the sustainability of technological civilization.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Cross-societal variation in norm enforcement systems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Norm violations and punishments across human societies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Rebels with a cause? How norm violations shape dominance, prestige, and influence granting.PloS one · 2023Article
- Variations in limited resources allocation towards friends and strangers in children and adolescents from seven economically and culturally diverse societies.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Four Puzzles of Reputation-Based Cooperation : Content, Process, Honesty, and Structure.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Dominance in humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Game modelling and stability strategy research on distributed leadership pattern: A tripartite evolutionary game perspective.PloS one · 2022Article
- Direct punishment and indirect reputation-based tactics to intervene against offences.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The content and structure of reputation domains across human societies: a view from the evolutionary social sciences.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Prestige and content biases together shape the cultural transmission of narratives.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Pandemic Leadership: Sex Differences and Their Evolutionary-Developmental Origins.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Ethnoscientific expertise and knowledge specialisation in 55 traditional cultures.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Correlates of conflict resolution across cultures.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Acculturation and market integration are associated with greater trust among Tanzanian Maasai pastoralists.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- The Marginal Utility of Inequality : A Global Examination across Ethnographic Societies.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2020Article
- Foresight in a Game of Leadership.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This study tested four theoretical models of leadership with data from the ethnographic record. The first was a game-theoretical model of leadership in collective actions, in which followers prefer and reward a leader who monitors and sanctions free-riders as group size increases. The second was the dominance model, in which dominant leaders threaten followers with physical or social harm. The third, the prestige model, suggests leaders with valued skills and expertise are chosen by followers who strive to emulate them. The fourth proposes that in small-scale, kin-based societies, men with high neural capital are best able to achieve and maintain positions of social influence (e.g., as headmen) and thereby often become polygynous and have more offspring than other men, which positively selects for greater neural capital. Using multiple search strategies we identified more than 1000 texts relevant to leadership in the Probability Sample of 60 cultures from the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF). We operationalized the model with variables and then coded all retrieved text records on the presence or absence of evidence for each of these 24 variables. We found mixed support for the collective action model, broad support for components of the prestige leadership style and the importance of neural capital and polygyny among leaders, but more limited support for the dominance leadership style. We found little evidence, however, of emulation of, or prestige-biased learning toward, leaders. We found that improving collective actions, having expertise, providing counsel, and being respected, having high neural capital, and being polygynous are common properties of leaders, which warrants a synthesis of the collective action, prestige, and neural capital and reproductive skew models. We sketch one such synthesis involving high-quality decision-making and other computational services.
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