Height gives leaders an edge for tall tasks

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London: Why did Barack Obama win the US Presidential election and did his imposing six-feet frame influence the voters? The authors of a paper published in Current Biology this month argue that due to ‘a hangover from our evolutionary past’ factors like age, sex, height and weight play a major part in the determining our choice of leaders. Professor Mark van Vugt, an associate member of the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford and an author of the paper, said: “Traits like height, age, gender, masculinity/femininity, and weight all appear to matter when we vote for our leaders. These are likely hangovers from our evolutionary past ancestral leadership prototypes that are context-dependent”. He added “When we face particular threats, these elicit particular prototypes”.

Therefore, leaders who match these ancestral prototypes have a better chance of being elected.” The article says that although human societies continue to rely heavily on political, economic, military, professional and religious leaders to function effectively, there is a consistently high rate of leadership failure. Author Andrew King, from the Zoological Society of London, said: “Evolution has fashioned principles governing leadership and follower-ship over many millions of years.

“We need to ground the complex, even mystical, social phenomenon of leadership in science. “Through empirical observation, theoretical models, neuroscience, experimental psychology, and genetics, we can explore the development and adaptive functions of leadership and follower-ship.”

Author Dominic Johnson, from the department of politics and international relations at the university of Edinburgh, said: “The role of leadership has often been overlooked in the natural sciences especially its important but under-explored role in the evolution of cooperation, yet it is arguably one of the most important themes in the social sciences.