title: Leadership in Mammalian Societies: Emergence, Distribution, Power, and Payoff.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Mills College, Oakland, CA 94613, USA. Electronic address: jesmith@mills.edu.
authors.forename: Jennifer E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Department of Mathematics, University of Tennessee, and National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA.
authors.forename: Sergey
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gavrilets
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, and Center for Population Biology, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
authors.forename: Monique Borgerhoff
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Mulder
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
authors.forename: Paul L
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Hooper
authors.affiliation: Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK.
authors.forename: Claire El
authors.initials: CE
authors.lastname: Mouden
authors.affiliation: Centre for Behavior and Evolution, and Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, Newcastle NE2 4HH, UK.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Nettle
authors.affiliation: Departments of Mathematics and Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada.
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hauert
authors.affiliation: Institute for Human Origins, and School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA.
authors.forename: Kim
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hill
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Perry
authors.affiliation: Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
authors.forename: Anne E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Pusey
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: van Vugt
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-3100, USA. Electronic address: easmith@uw.edu.
authors.forename: Eric Alden
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D005075:Biological Evolution; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007857:Leadership; D008322:Mammals; D009068:Movement; D012919:Social Behavior