Psychological Biases

Modern human leadership is related to our ability to organize and is based on psychological biases that were acquired almost 2.5 million years ago (van Vugt, 2008). Out of those early evolutionary pressures emerged a form of leadership that anthropologists believe can be observed among the !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert and the Yanomamo of the Amazon. It bears little or no resemblance to the forms of leadership studied by those being prepared for leadership in today’s world.

The differences between the egalitarian leadership style practiced by our early ancestors and the dominance hierarchies that form the basis of our current leadership model is striking. The personality and trait driven leadership models on which our current leadership models are based do not represent a natural evolution from that early model of natural leadership.

Much is made of the fact that humans are a social species but we often forget that our first permanent groups were our families. It is from these family groups that we developed our leadership psychology and the egalitarian leadership style it produced.

We must have acquired those psychological biases much closer to the beginning of the first phase of human development and we have maintained this stable and successful form of leadership for the past 2.5 million years.

Van Vugt’s account of how we developed the conditions that gave rise to our current dominance hierarchies is instructive. The development of agriculture was a natural facet of our evolutionary development, but the authoritarian leadership style that emanated was not inevitable.

If our psychological biases produced an egalitarian form of leadership, it stands to reason that our social psychology must have also been egalitarian. We must have been pre-disposed to consider any surpluses accumulated by the community as the property of the community, rather than the property of the one who happened to be in charge at the moment.

Use of communal property to create cultural elites was an unfortunate turn of events. But the evolution of our leadership styles to the quasi-egalitarian Transformational Era is an indication that the evolutionary processes that gave rise to our first and lasting form of leadership have not been successfully overcome.

The answer is not to abandon all vestiges of individual ownership and return to communal ownership. The genie is already out of the bottle.

If we desire to make the transition to the form of global leadership that nature prescribes we must find a way to bridge the gap between the two.

The effects go beyond our formal organizations. In a weird twist of fate family life is now infested with the same authoritarian approach to leadership. We have turned back on ourselves. An egalitarian family structure produced reinforced psychological biases that gave rise to egalitarian organizational structures. Now, our formalized and authoritarian leadership styles have produced the same approaches in the family unit.

At the same time that we continue to improve our current forms of leadership in our business, social and cultural organizations we must find the common thread between our current leadership style and the leadership that was practiced by our ancestors. That will be the subject of the next blog.