Leadership, Followership, and Evolution: Some Lessons from the Past

Van Vugt and colleagues apply evolutionary psychology to leadership — the argument that the cognitive architecture humans use to lead and follow each other was shaped by small-group hunter-gatherer life, and most contemporary leadership contexts are mismatches with that architecture. The piece is serious academic work, not pop evolutionary psychology, and the reasoning is careful. For product direction the transfer is useful as perspective: many of the frictions in modern organisations (large groups, hierarchical relationships, followership at a distance) are evolutionarily novel, and noticing that does not solve them but does reframe what "natural" means. Read alongside Alznauer's Leading Naturally for the applied version.