In conclusion... :))

I'm happy to report this project has reached conclusion! TL;DR: pub here.

A few updates.

Thanks to the funds raised here and support from my university (and a good bit of self-funding), I collected qualitative and quantitative data that has produced novel insight from a rare and understudied cultural and ecological setting – a small-scale and egalitarian society undergoing significant cultural and economic transition.

We've been able to learn from and do quite a bit with these data. For one, I was able to apply for and was awarded a doctoral dissertation research grant from the National Science Foundation for additional field research. I conducted additional fieldwork in 2018 and plan to return to Ethiopia later this summer, right before finally defending my dissertation in July 2019.

It is an honor and privilege to have been able to spend time with my Chabu friends and all credit goes to their assistance, support, and interest in facilitating this work. I am deeply grateful for their generosity and friendship. The Chabu are happy to have more people across the world learn about their culture and lifestyles. All photos and videos I share are done so with their consent and enthusiasm. I have some photo and video galleries posted on my department page. During my most recent field trip, I dedicated substantial time to learning Chabu. I was without assistants or translators for several weeks and this immersion was incredibly interesting and super challenging. Thanks to the amazing linguistic work of my friend and colleague Dr. Kibebe, I was able to draw on his materials and a few direct lessons with him in my immersion language studies. I recorded video of one of my language lessons with my friend and teacher, Adneal (pardon the beard-trim; you never know what's going to happen when you sit in a barber's chair in rural Ethiopia).

I've presented these data at scientific conferences several times, including at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) meetings in Amsterdam last summer. The slides from that talk are publicly available. I'll also present a poster on the female data at HBES this summer in Boston (which I'll eventually post here).

This study, titled Investigating evolutionary models of leadership among recently settled Ethiopian hunter-gatherers, is now published (online first, print coming soon) in The Leadership Quarterly, "a social-science journal dedicated to advancing our understanding of leadership as a phenomenon, how to study it, as well as its practical implications." Our publication (available here) will be included in a special issue on the evolution and biology of leadership co-edited by Mark Van Vugt and Chris von Rueden. I'm happy to share the PDF via email (zachary.garfield@wsu.edu) with anyone interested. We have acknowledged and thanked the backers in the publication and linked to this experiment.com project. Again, thank you all for your support and many thanks to the developers of experiement.com for facilitating crowd-funded science!

Here is the conclusion section from the publication, Garfield & Hagen (2019) Investigating evolutionary models of leadership among recently settled Ethiopian hunter-gatherers:

The study reported here is among the few to systematically investigate leaders in a small-scale society and among even fewer to compare male and female leaders. It is notable there are several female leadership positions and women maintain autonomy in many domains, despite a male bias in leadership roles. Generally, female and male leaders display similar phenotypic profiles including high peer-ratings on cognitive, social, productivity, and reproductive traits. The one clear exception is aggressiveness, which characterizes male elected leaders, whereas a lack of aggressiveness characterizes female elected leaders. Despite a history and relative persistence of egalitarianism, including gender-egalitarianism, Chabu women face constraints in their ability employ dominance-based leadership strategies that men do not, a pat- tern consistent with broader political institutions cross-culturally, especially among Western societies (Low, 2005; Williams & Tiedens, 2016). These results suggest women and men may rely on dominance in sex-specific ways, with differences potentially related to life history (Brown, 1985) or variation in social, embodied, and material capital (Hess & Hagen, 2006, 2017; Von Rueden, Alami, Kaplan, & Gurven, 2018). More generally, the evolutionary importance of women's lea- dership has been overlooked by most theorists, perhaps because of a failure to recognize the importance of leadership within families (Garfield, Hubbard, & Hagen, 2019; Garfield, von Rueden, & Hagen, 2019; Smith, Ortiz, Buhbe, & Van Vugt, In press), a key topic for future research. 

Although dominance and prestige are both associated with elected leaders among the Chabu, prestige is clearly more critical. Our data do support a general distinction between dominance and prestige, but we also find that the components of dominance – being feared and being aggressive – are also distinct. Established dominance hierarchies limit the need for physical aggression in contest competition. Evidence suggests humans are equipped with psychological mechanisms to assess variation in strength and fighting ability from visual, vocal, and other cues (Sell et al., 2010, 2009). Individuals who are feared may be able to achieve dominance-based influence without relying on direct aggression. We suggest there is likely significant overlap between at least some components of dominance and some components of prestige within human social and political hierarchies. A possible mechanism of this overlap may be the necessary connections between, (1) the association of physical formidability and social dominance, (2) the physical demands of economic productivity, and (3) the high degrees of respect often bestowed towards physically formidable individuals well- equipped to provide group benefits, such as conflict resolution, facilitating cooperation, and sharing surpluses of critical resources (Chapais, 2015; Lukaszewski, Simmons, Anderson, & Roney, 2016; Von Rueden, Gurven, Kaplan, & Stieglitz, 2014). 

We provide the first evidence of leader-directed social learning biases supporting theories linking prestige-biased learning and leader- ship, but also find learning biases include dominant individuals and do not strongly predict leader status relative to other traits, presenting new challenges to such theories. 

The high colinearity of the diverse traits measured here suggests that each of the domains of leadership traits that we investigated — cognition, sociality, productivity, reproduction, and dominance — are potentially important in understanding variation between leaders and non‐leaders. To systematically overlook any of these domains may be a severe methodological limitation and this strong positive covariation of most leadership traits warrants further investigation.