Mark Van Vugt

• Professor (Full) at VU University Amsterdam and University of Oxford

Sexual misperceptions refer to instances in which individuals wrongly infer sexual interest from other people. Traditionally, such sexual misperceptions have been studied within the dating context among student samples primarily. Our research extends this line of research and examines sexual misperceptions in the workplace. In a two-wave survey (N...

People across cultures engage in various practices that alter their appearance (e.g., makeup, tanning, facial aesthetic treatment). Theories in social and evolutionary psychology propose that the primary function of these practices is to create an appearance perceived more positively by others, ultimately resulting in more favorable outcomes in soc...

Climate change poses an unprecedented challenge to humanity, and persuasive environmental communication is a crucial step for global leaders to counteract its consequences. Charismatic leaders are especially effective in communicating information. Interestingly, in recent years, there have been frequent incidences where charismatic leaders made inc...

Identifying an integrative framework that could appropriately delineate underlying mechanisms and individual risk/protective factors for human health has remained elusive. Evolutionary mismatch theory provides a comprehensive, integrative model for understanding the underlying causes and mechanisms of a wide range of modern health and well-being pr...

This paper makes the case for an evolutionary mismatch between digital work and the way human ancestors engaged in work. Psychological adaptations for producing things that early humans needed to survive and thrive, such as cognitive mechanisms for obtaining and processing food, toolmaking, and learning valuable working skills, evolved in the conte...

Mitigating environmental problems requires not only individual action and commitment to sustainability but also strong leadership to mobilise individuals, coordinate collective efforts and resolve conflicts among relevant agents and parties. But what do people look for in a strong environmental leader? Building from evolutionary models of leadershi...

Background: Due to the great importance of the face in social interaction, minimally invasive treatments can-besides their ability to rejuvenate and enhance beauty-also change the way facial impressions of a person are perceived. In recent literature, three main character traits (attractiveness, trustworthiness, and competence) and subdomains esse...

Adopting a cognitive and follower-centric approach to charismatic leadership, we hypothesized that followers show lower levels of cognitive effort, reflected in superficial processing of factually correct information when listening to and viewing a charismatic leader. We conducted two experiments, using a 2 (charismatic versus neutral) × 2 (female...

Research on commercial computer games has demonstrated that in-game behavior is related to the players’ personality profiles. However, this potential has not yet been fully utilized for personality assessments. Hence, we developed an applied (i.e., serious) assessment game to assess the Honesty–Humility personality trait. In two studies, we demonst...

Intergroup conflict is a major evolutionary force shaping animal and human societies. Males and females should, on average, experience different costs and benefits for participating in collective action. Specifically, among mammals, male fitness is generally limited by access to mates whereas females are limited by access to food and safety. Here w...

Why do some people have children earlier compared to others who delay reproduction? Drawing from an evolutionary, life history theory perspective, we posited that reproductive timing could be influenced by economic uncertainty and childhood socioeconomic status (SES). For individuals lower in childhood SES, economic uncertainty influenced the desir...

This paper investigates the impact of greening schoolyards on children’s (age 7-11) play and non-play behavior during recess. Five primary schools in The Netherlands took part in a longitudinal prospective intervention study using a pre-post design with a baseline and two-year follow-up. At baseline, all schoolyards were paved. Between baseline and...

People usually engage in (or at least profess to engage in) altruistic acts to benefit others. Yet, they routinely fail to maximize how much good is achieved with their donated money and time. An accumulating body of research has uncovered various psychological factors that can explain why people’s altruism tends to be ineffective. These prior stud...

People usually engage in (or at least profess to engage in) altruistic acts to benefit others. Yet, they routinely fail to maximize how much good is achieved with their donated money and time. An accumulating body of research has uncovered various psychological factors that can explain why people’s altruism tends to be ineffective. These prior stud...

Social influence is distributed unequally between males and females in many mammalian societies. In human societies, gender inequality is particularly evident in access to leadership positions. Understanding why women historically and cross-culturally have tended to be under-represented as leaders within human groups and organizations represents a...

We examine climate-related activities through an evolutionary psychology lens, zooming in on factors that motivate or discourage people to behave sustainably to mitigate climate change. Complementing current knowledge, we discuss five core ancestral psychological motivations that shape people’s environmental decisions in fundamental ways. We review...

Conspicuous conservation refers to pro-environmental activities that are intended as signals of some attractive quality of the actor. As some of these qualities are desirable in romantic partners, people may purchase green products or services to impress potential romantic partners. We propose that conspicuous conservation communicates generosity –...

We present a meta-analytic review of the literature on sex differences in the trust game (174 effect sizes) and the related gift-exchange game (35 effect sizes). Based on parental investment theory and social role theory we expected men to be more trusting and women to be more trustworthy. Indeed, men were more trusting in the trust game (g = 0.22)...

One of the evolutionary adaptive benefits of altruism may be that it acts as an honest (reliable) signal of men’s mate quality. In this study, 285 female participants were shown one of three video scenarios in which a male target took £30 out of a cash machine (ATM) and gave either a lot (£30), a little (£1), or nothing to a homeless man. The parti...

The impacts of COVID-19 on workers and workplaces across the globe have been dramatic. This broad review of prior research rooted in work and organizational psychology, and related fields, is intended to make sense of the implications for employees, teams, and work organizations. This review and preview of relevant literatures focuses on (a) emerge...

COVID-19’s impacts on workers and workplaces across the globe have been dramatic. We present a broad review of prior research rooted in work and organizational psychology, and related fields, for making sense of the implications for employees, teams, and work organizations. Our review and preview of relevant literatures focuses on: (i) emerging cha...

As acceptance of evolutionary perspectives in mainstream psychology grows, it becomes increasingly pertinent to ask what evolutionary psychology can do to solve real-world problems and better our lives. Answers to this important question will more than likely require an understanding and application of the evolutionary mismatch framework. This powe...

Evolutionary perspectives are part of any comprehensive explanation of leadership and, more generally, hierarchy formation in groups. This editorial describes contributions to a special issue on the theme of “The evolution and biology of leadership: A new synthesis”, and we reach four main conclusions. First, leadership has been a powerful force in...

Environmental problems are due to the fact of humans prioritizing their narrow personal interests over collective interests. How can pro-environmental behavior be promoted without requiring people to behave in ways that go against their selfish tendencies? Kin selection theory asserts that humans are predisposed to ensure the survival and replicati...

Are male and female immigrants viewed similarly or differently? Consistent with an evolutionary threat management perspective, we suggest that the answer to this question depends upon what types of threats immigrant groups are perceived as posing. In the present study, we compared attitudes toward male and female immigrants from either a violent ec...

From the popularity of authoritarian political leaders to the under-representation of women in boardrooms, leadership is an important theme in current human social affairs. Leadership is also a prominent research topic in the biological, social, and cognitive sciences. However, these active literatures have evolved somewhat independently and there...

Unobtrusive behavioral cues of personality traits can be found in physical and virtual environments (e.g., office environments and social media profiles), but detecting and coding such cues are a painstaking effort, and therefore impractical for research purposes. Measuring people’s choices in a virtual, gamified environment may offer a suitable su...

Worldwide there is an underrepresentation of women in top leadership roles in business and politics. Many explanations have been offered, including the glass ceiling and glass cliff hypotheses. Here we investigate an alternative explanation, the glass pyramid hypothesis, the idea that certain aspects of women’s psychology (including lower risk taki...

Across different experiments we show that individual differences in Honesty-Humility predict exploitation in economic games, and that this relation is moderated by situational power. Power was manipulated by comparing games in which allocators either had absolute power (dictator game), intermediate (delta game), or shared power (ultimatum game) ove...

Emergent leadership—the ascription of informal leadership responsibilities among team members—is a dynamic phenomenon that comes into place through social interactions. Yet, theory remains sparse about the importance of verbal behaviors for emergent leadership in self- managed teams over a team’s lifecycle. Adopting a functional perspective on lead...

Research has shown a positive association between cues of physical formidability and perceptions of status, supporting a generic “bigger-is-better” heuristic. However, does better also lead to appraisals as bigger? Recent research suggests that the perceptual association between body size and social status can also be explained in terms of prestige...

Learning the local language is important for the successful integration of immigrants. Previous research has identified a number of sociodemographic factors that are associated with the effectiveness of local language acquisition among immigrants, but little is known about the influence of psychological differences on immigrants’ local language acq...

Researchers have proposed that intergroup prejudice is partially caused by behavioral immune system mechanisms. Across four studies (total N = 1,849), we used both experimental (pathogen priming) and individual differences (pathogen disgust sensitivity [PDS]) approaches to test whether the behavioral immune system influences prejudice toward immigr...

From an evolutionary perspective, followership is puzzling because it is not clear why individuals would relinquish their autonomy and set aside their personal goals to follow those of another individual, the leader. This paper analyzes followership from an evolutionary perspective and advances three main conclusions that are not yet part of the le...

Belief in conspiracy theories—such as that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job or that the pharmaceutical industry deliberately spreads diseases—is a widespread and culturally universal phenomenon. Why do so many people around the globe believe conspiracy theories, and why are they so influential? Previous research focused on the proximat...

Women remain universally underrepresented in the top leadership positions. A comparative evolutionary framework may offer new insights into the value of and potential barriers to female leadership. Here we define leaders as individuals who impose a disproportional influence on the collective behaviors of group members. We reviewed data for 76 socia...

Excessive meat consumption is associated with a range of environmental problems. In this investigation, we examined the effectiveness of three types of persuasive messages posited to affect attitudes toward meat consumption. The first two messages contained health and environment-related appeals (e.g., the moral consequences of environmental degrad...

KnapenOpenPracticesDisclosure – Supplemental material for The Napoleon Complex: When Shorter Men Take More

KnapenSupplementalMaterial – Supplemental material for The Napoleon Complex: When Shorter Men Take More

The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of appeals to ingroup wrongdoings, as opposed to ingroup rightdoings, on reconciliation between groups in a real‐world conflict. We conducted an experiment in Indonesia, where separatist conflict in the province West Papua is currently unresolved. Participants were a sample of Javanese resident...

The present research replicates and extends previous literature on the evolutionary contingency hypothesis of leadership emergence. Using artificially masculinized versus feminized versions of the faces of the candidates for the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, we demonstrated that different contextual cues produced systematic variation in both pr...

Inspired by an evolutionary psychological perspective on the Napoleon complex, we hypothesized that shorter males are more likely to show indirect aggression in resource competitions with taller males. Three studies provide support for our interpretation of the Napoleon complex. Our pilot study shows that men (but not women) keep more resources for...

Appendix S3.Exploratory analyses: Indirect effect of empowerment.

Appendix S2. List of items.

Appendix S5. Latent factors correlation.

Appendix S1. List of demographic variables.

Appendix S4. Figure 1: Effect of help type mediated by empowerment.

This field study investigated the consequences of receiving poverty aid through conditional transfer programmes in the form of autonomy-oriented help (i.e., cash) or dependency-oriented help (i.e., vouchers) in impoverished rural communities in Panama. The empowering effects of autonomy- (vs. dependency-) help have so far only been studied in labor...

Human psychological mechanisms are adaptations that evolved to process environmental inputs, turning them into behavioral outputs that, on average, increase survival or reproductive prospects. Modern contexts, however, differ vastly from the environments that existed as human psychological mechanisms evolved. Many inputs now differ in quantity and...

Outgroup members are often perceived as threating and untrustworthy, and this is particularly true for judgments of outgroup males. As race influences perceptions of group membership, male racial outgroup faces (MROFs) are judged as less trustworthy than male racial ingroup faces (MRIFs). Neurologically, this effect is mediated by amygdala activati...

This article provides an introduction to evolutionary psychology and its relevance to organizational design theory and practice. Evolutionary psychology assumes that human nature reflect adaptations to an ancestral environment that was intensely social, but differed profoundly from modern organizations in scale and complexity. Further, organization...

Hair cortisol concentrations (HCCs) are a potential physiological indicator of work related stress. However, studies that tested the relationship between HCC and self-reported stress in a work setting show mixed findings. This may be because few studies used worker samples that experience prolonged stress. Therefore, we compared a high workload sam...

Integrating evolutionary signaling theory with a social attention approach, we argue that individuals possess a fast, automated mechanism for detecting leadership signals in fellow humans that is reflected in higher visual attention toward emergent leaders compared to non-leaders. To test this notion, we first videotaped meetings of project teams a...

We present an evolutionary perspective on charismatic leadership, arguing that charisma has evolved as a credible signal of a person's ability to solve a coordination challenge requiring urgent collective action from group members. We suggest that a better understanding of charisma's evolutionary and biological origins and functions can provide a b...

A contribution to a special issue on Hormones and Human Competition. Testosterone is theorized to influence status-seeking behaviors such as social dominance and competitive behavior, but supporting evidence is mixed. The present study tested the roles of testosterone and cortisol in the hawk-dove game, a dyadic economic decision-making paradigm in...

In four studies we examined the effect of overconfidence on escalation of commitment in investment tasks. Study 1 (N = 105) revealed a positive relationship between overconfidence and decisions to escalate. In contrast, Study 2 (N = 121) showed that overconfidence was negatively related to escalation of commitment. The reversal of this effect appea...

When group cohesion is essential, groups must have efficient strategies in place for consensus decision-making. Recent theoretical work suggests that shared decision-making is often the most efficient way for dealing with both information uncertainty and individual variation in preferences. However, some animal and most human groups make collective...

This article examines the role of basal testosterone as a potential biological marker of leadership and hierarchy in the workplace. First, we report the result of a study with a sample of male employees from different corporate organizations in the Netherlands (_n_ = 125). Results showed that employees with higher basal testosterone levels reported...

The existence of individual differences in personality can be puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. This paper offers a general framework for addressing this puzzle by combining insights from evolutionary, situational, and personality perspectives. To arrive at this framework, we first discuss three key evolutionary models for explaining perso...

A fundamental challenge to understanding our evolved psychology is to explain how cooperative or prosocial behaviors are maintained despite the immediate temptation to free-ride. We propose that charismatic leadership and followership can be best understood as a product of this recurrent, fitness-relevant selection pressure for adaptations that eff...

Evolutionary psychology adds many insights to the literature on group dynamics and small-group processes. First, groups are a fundamental aspect of human evolution, suggesting that humans have evolved a range of adaptations to deal with specific threats and opportunities afforded by living in groups. Second, an evolutionary perspective integrates k...

Many psychological studies have shown that facial appearance matters in the people we select as leaders. An evolutionary-psychology approach suggests that facial cues serve as inputs into an adaptive, context-sensitive followership psychology. That is, leadership suitability may be contingent upon the match between facial cues (indicating, e.g., do...

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 th...

This chapter explores the origins, evolution, and psychology of status and social hierarchy. Given the ubiquitous nature of status hierarchies in both human and nonhuman groups, and the fitness consequences associated with position in hierarchies, natural selection likely favored psychological mechanisms specialized for navigating status hierarchie...

Drawing on social, community, and place identity theories, we predicted that individuals whose identities are based, at least in part, on the place where they reside would be more likely to engage in environmentally responsible behaviors, or ERBs. Study 1 tested this hypothesis by assessing residents’ localized community identification and their wi...

An evolutionary perspective brings many insights to the literature on group behavior. First, groups are a fundamental aspect of hominid evolution, suggesting that humans have evolved a range of adaptations to deal with challenges arising within group-living contexts. Second, an evolutionary perspective integrates knowledge from numerous behavioral...

We use the concept of niche construction—the process whereby individuals, through their activities, interactions, and choices, modify their own and each other’s environments—as an example of how biological evolution and cultural evolution interacted to form an integrative foundation of modern organizational leadership. Resulting adaptations are for...

We report three studies which test a sexual selection hypothesis for male war heroism. Based on evolutionary theories of mate choice we hypothesize that men signal their fitness through displaying heroism in combat. First, we report the results of an archival study on US-American soldiers who fought in World War II. We compare proxies for reproduct...

This chapter outlines the ‘service-for-prestige’ theory of leadership. According to this theory, the optimal form of leader-follower relationship is one in which leaders provide followers with their expertise and organizational skills, and in exchange, followers provide leaders with prestige. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, such re...

The current chapter investigates the relationship between someone's physical size and assessments of their social status. Physical size is related to status in many species-including humans- and may affect both real and perceived status. We refer to this as the status-size hypothesis, the automatic association between physical size and position in...

We describe the service-for-prestige theory of leadership, which proposes that voluntary leader–follower relations evolved in humans via a process of reciprocal exchange that generated adaptive benefits for both leaders and followers. We propose that although leader–follower relations first emerged in the human lineage to solve problems related to...

Physical size is related to status in many species – including humans – and may affect both real and perceived status. Here, we investigate the relationship between social status and assessments of physical size in humans. We distinguish between different aspects of physical size (height and muscularity) and different pathways to obtain status in g...

It is widely agreed that humans must reduce their environmental impact. We propose that an improved understanding of our evolved human nature can help to improve programs and policies to address environmental problems. Combining evolutionary and social psychological approaches, we argue that environmental problems are often caused or exacerbated by...