It seems to be out of fashion, but I always find it interesting when people try to draw social parallels between people and animals. This reminds me of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, which spends hundreds of pages on ants and termites, and after I worked my way through it I actually feel more of an affinity for these creatures and the complex mini-civilizations they have built.

Leadership in Mammalian Societies: Emergence, Distribution, Power, and Payoff

Leadership is an active area of research in both the biological and social sciences. This review provides a transdisciplinary synthesis of biological and social-science views of leadership from an evolutionary perspective, and examines patterns of leadership in a set of small-scale human and non-human mammalian societies. We review empirical and theoretical work on leadership in four domains: movement, food acquisition, within-group conflict mediation, and between-group interactions. We categorize patterns of variation in leadership in five dimensions: distribution (across individuals), emergence (achieved versus inherited), power, relative payoff to leadership, and generality (across domains). We find that human leadership exhibits commonalities with and differences from the broader mammalian pattern, raising interesting theoretical and empirical issues.