Mark van Vugt

The evolutionary psychology of leadership Theory, review, and roadmap

Evolutionary leadership theory (ELT) argues that humans possess specialized psychological mechanisms for solving coordination problems through leadership and followership. We discuss the evolutionary functions and psychological processes underlying leadership, and how to study leadership and followership from an integrated evolutionary perspective. An evolutionary perspective offers novel insights into major barriers to leadership effectiveness in organizations. These obstacles include (a) mismatches between modern and ancestral environments, (b) evolved cognitive biases affecting leader selection and decision-making and (c) innate psychological mechanisms designed to dominate and exploit other individuals. Understanding the evolved psychological mechanisms underlying leadership, in terms of adaptive functions, mismatches, and psychological processes, is critical for the development and integration of leadership theory, research, and practice.

Do natural landscapes reduce future discounting in humans

An important barrier to enduring behavioural change is the human tendency to discount the future. Drawing on evolutionary theories of life history and biophilia, this study investigates whether exposure to natural versus urban landscapes affects peoples temporal discount rates. The results of three studies, two laboratory experiments and a field study reveal that individual discount rates are systematically lower after people have been exposed to scenes of natural environments as opposed to urban environments. Further, this effect is owing to people placing more value on the future after nature exposure. The finding that nature exposure reduces future discounting—as opposed to exposure to urban environments—conveys important implications for a range of personal and collective outcomes including healthy lifestyles, sustainable resource use and population growth.

The Many Faces of Leadership An Evolutionary-Psychology Approach

Many psychological studies have shown that facial appearance matters in the people we select as leaders. An evolutionary-psychology approach suggests that facial cues serve as inputs into an adaptive, context-sensitive followership psychology. That is, leadership suitability may be contingent upon the match between facial cues (indicating, e.g., dominance, trust, competence, and attractiveness) and follower needs. There is much support for this evolutionary-contingency hypothesis in the psychological literature. People prefer leaders with dominant, masculine-looking faces in times of war and conflict, yet they prefer leaders with more trustworthy, feminine faces in peacetime. In addition, leaders with older-looking faces are preferred in traditional knowledge domains, whereas younger-looking leaders are preferred for new challenges. We speculate about whether such followership heuristics are evolved or culturally learned, currently adaptive or mismatched, and, finally, we address the implications of the evolutionary-contingency hypothesis for leadership theory and practice.

Gender and facial dominance in gaze cuing: emotional context matters in the eyes that we follow.

Gaze following is a socio-cognitive process that provides adaptive information about potential threats and opportunities in the individual’s environment. The aim of the present study was to investigate the potential interaction between emotional context and facial dominance in gaze following. We used the gaze cue task to induce attention to or away from the location of a target stimulus. In the experiment, the gaze cue either belonged to a (dominant looking) male face or a (non-dominant looking) female face. Critically, prior to the task, individuals were primed with pictures of threat or no threat to induce either a dangerous or safe environment. Findings revealed that the primed emotional context critically influenced the gaze cuing effect. While a gaze cue of the dominant male face influenced performance in both the threat and no-threat conditions, the gaze cue of the non-dominant female face only influenced performance in the no-threat condition. This research suggests an implicit, context-dependent follower bias, which carries implications for research on visual attention, social cognition, and leadership.

Think Leader, Think White? Capturing and Weakening an Implicit Pro-White Leadership Bias

Across four studies, we found evidence for an implicit pro-White leadership bias that helps explain the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in leadership positions. Both White-majority and ethnic minority participants reacted significantly faster when ethnically White names and leadership roles (e.g., manager; Study 1) or leadership traits (e.g., decisiveness; Study 2 & 3) were paired in an Implicit Association Test (IAT) rather than when ethnic minority names and leadership traits were paired. Moreover, the implicit pro-White leadership bias showed discriminant validity with the conventional implicit bias measures (Study 3). Importantly, results showed that the pro-White leadership bias can be weakened when situational cues increase the salience of a dual identity (Study 4). This, in turn, can diminish the explicit pro-White bias in promotion related decision making processes (Study 4). This research offers a new tool to measure the implicit psychological processes underlying the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in leadership positions and proposes interventions to weaken such biases.

The Status-Size Hypothesis: How Cues of Physical Size and Social Status Influence Each Other

The current chapter investigates the relationship between someone’s physical size and assessments of their social status. Physical size is related to status in many species—including humans—and may affect both real and perceived status. We refer to this as the status-size hypothesis, the automatic association between physical size and position in a status hierarchy. We review the evidence for this hypothesis, drawing on both human and non-human data. Furthermore, we distinguish between different aspects of physical size and pathways to obtain status in groups with implications for the status-size effect. We find that height and muscularity differently affect status perception, and that status obtained through coercion (dominance) differently affects size perception than status obtained through voluntary deference (prestige). Furthermore, contextual cues of competition versus cooperation moderate the status–size relationship. A review of results from various studies, including our own, supports various predictions from the hypothesis: (a) high status dominant and prestigious individuals are estimated taller, and (b) taller individuals are estimated higher in prestige and dominance-based status; (c) dominant high-status individuals are perceived as more muscular than prestigious high-status individuals, (d) more muscular individuals are perceived as dominant but not necessarily prestigious; finally (e) unlike adults, primary school-aged children associate size with dominance but not with prestige, suggesting that though dominance may be universally linked to increased size, the relationship between height and prestige is culturally learned.

The Evolutionary Mismatch Hypothesis: Implications for Psychological Science:

Human psychological mechanisms are adaptations that evolved to process environmental inputs, turning them into behavioral outputs that, on average, increase survival or reproductive prospects. Modern contexts, however, differ vastly from the environments that existed as human psychological mechanisms evolved. Many inputs now differ in quantity and intensity or no longer have the same fitness associations, thereby leading many mechanisms to produce maladaptive output. We present the precepts of this evolutionary mismatch process, highlight areas of mismatch, and consider implications for psychological science and policy.

Hormonal underpinnings of status conflict: Testosterone and cortisol are related to decisions and satisfaction in the hawk-dove game

Abstract A contribution to a special issue on Hormones and Human Competition.Testosterone is theorized to influence status‐seeking behaviors such as social dominance and competitive behavior, but supporting evidence is mixed. The present study tested the roles of testosterone and cortisol in the hawk‐dove game, a dyadic economic decision‐making paradigm in which earnings depend on ones own and the other players choices. If one person selects the hawk strategy and the other person selects the dove strategy, the player who selected hawk attains a greater financial pay‐off (status differentiation). The worst financial outcome occurs when both players choose the hawk strategy (status confrontation). Ninety‐eight undergraduate students (42 men) provided saliva samples and played ten rounds of the hawk‐dove game with another same‐sex participant. In support of the hypothesis that testosterone is related to status concern, individuals higher in basal testosterone made more hawk decisions — decisions that harmed the other player. Acute decreases in cortisol were also associated with more hawk decisions. There was some empirical support for the dual‐hormone hypothesis as well: basal testosterone was positively related to satisfaction in the game among low basal‐cortisol individuals but not among high basal‐cortisol individuals. There were no significant sex differences in these hormonal effects. The present findings align with theories of hormones and status‐seeking behavior at the individual level, but they also open up new avenues for research on hormone profiles at the collective level. Our results suggest that the presence of two or more high‐testosterone members increases the likelihood of status confrontations over a limited resource that can undermine collective outcomes. HighlightsParticipants played ten rounds of the hawk‐dove game.Players can select a dominance (hawk) or deference (dove) strategy in each round.Basal testosterone was positively related to the number of hawk decisions.Cortisol change was negatively related to the number of hawk decisions.Basal testosterone and basal cortisol jointly predicted satisfaction in the game.

Hair cortisol and work stress: Importance of workload and stress model (JDCS or ERI)

Hair cortisol concentrations (HCCs) are a potential physiological indicator of work related stress. However, studies that tested the relationship between HCC and self-reported stress in a work setting show mixed findings. This may be because few studies used worker samples that experience prolonged stress. Therefore, we compared a high workload sample (nu202f=u202f81) and a normal workload sample (nu202f=u202f91) and studied whether HCC was related to: (i) high job demands, low control, and low social support (JDCS model), and (ii) high effort, low reward, and high overcommitment (ERI model). Results showed that self-reported stress related to HCC only in the high workload sample and only for the variables of the ERI model. We found that HCC was higher when effort was high, reward low, and overcommitment high. An implication of this study is that a certain stress threshold may need to be reached to detect a relationship between self-reported stress and physiological measures such as HCC.

Voting for a Male Warrior or Female Peacekeeper? Testing the Evolutionary Contingency Hypothesis in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections:

The present research replicates and extends previous literature on the evolutionary contingency hypothesis of leadership emergence. Using artificially masculinized versus feminized versions of the faces of the candidates for the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, we demonstrated that different contextual cues produced systematic variation in both preferences for and personality impressions of leadership. We describe results of an online study (N = 298), demonstrating that followers who perceived a match between the contextual prime (intergroup conflict or cooperation) and a leader candidate’s relevant physical cues (masculinized or feminized versions of their faces) both (a) preferred them as leaders and (b) rated them more positively on personality attributes commonly associated with effective leadership such as trustworthiness, warmth, competence, and charisma.