YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)

Human leadership and followership take many forms, shaped by the social, economic, political, and cultural contexts of our groups and societies. Underlying this complexity, we argue, are key elements of human social psychology regarding social comparison and the resolution of coordination and collective action problems. The Multi-Capital Leadership (MCL) theory posits that leader emergence and effectiveness depend on perceptions of individuals’ abilities to provide benefits or impose costs in solving challenges of group living, through the deployment of different forms of capital: material, social, somatic (e.g., physical formidability, height, immune functionality), and neural (e.g., knowledge, intelligence, personality, supernatural abilities). We integrate this framework with a review of leadership across human societies, including in non-state and non-industrial contexts, and with novel comparative analyses of ethnographic data. This synthesis highlights how context-specific demands for coordination and collective action, and the accuracy of social comparison, shape the structure and dynamics of leadership and followership across cultures.

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What makes someone a leader isn’t just strength or charisma. It’s the mix of resources they bring—and how those align with what their group needs.

When Western gender ideology gets in the way of good science

Why do we trust steady hands in some contexts and risk-takers in others? Evolutionary theory reveals how environments shape our shifting choices of leaders.