4 July 2020 | New Scientist | 31Merkel. Women aren’t restricted to prestige
leadership alone, but it is thought by some
that female leaders generally operate this
way because women’s responsibilities for
childcare and food-gathering throughout
most of human history have left them
with an “evolved psychology” that is more
cooperative, in general, than men’s. At least,
that’s how prestige leadership is depicted
by Mark van Vugt at Vrije University in
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Jennifer
Smith at Mills College in Oakland, California,
in a paper published last year that sets out
this evolutionary model.
They say that dominance leaders, in
contrast, exert influence by demanding >support, instilling fear in would-be dissenters
and threatening sanctions for anyone who
fails to toe the line. Think of any Machiavellian
ruler, from Attila the Hun to Stalin. There are
also plenty of examples of milder dominance
leaders around today, including Trump,
Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and Jair Bolsonaro
in Brazil. Being physically imposing is often
key to their approach, so such leaders are
almost always men, according to the
dominance/prestige model.
Van Vugt and Smith point to a range of
evidence indicating that these two leadership
styles are rooted in biology. Personality
tests of group leaders reveal that those
adopting a dominance style score higher“ Prestige
leaders use
their superior
personal
attributes to
influence”