Empathy

Human Behavioral Ecology

Unlike evolutionary psychologists who argue that natural selection acts on the regulatory machinery (i.e., the psychological mechanism) that underpins behavior, human behavioral ecologists focus instead on how people's behaviors are influenced by their environments, and how the adoption of alternative behaviors produces cultural differences. Their aim is to account for variation in behavior by questioning whether models of optimality and fitness maximization offer satisfactory explanations for differences seen across individuals. Also, whereas evolutionary psychology relies on participant self-reports in experimental settings, behavioral ecology observes people's actual behaviors in field settings. Human behavioral ecology's two principal tenets are that humans exhibit behavioral flexibility that allows them to adapt across different environments, and that adaptive tradeoffs or compromises limit the extent to which they can pursue a strategy given available resources. As such, selection would have favored the ability to take on strategies that maximized benefits and/or minimized costs in a given milieu, strategies that took the form "in situation A, do x, whereas in situation B, switch to y". The precise manner in which environmental cues brings about a change in behavior may depend on innate dispositions or socially transmitted culture, but understanding these causal mechanisms is not a prerequisite to studying the fitness outcomes of particular strategies.

Behavioral ecologists could help to elucidate what gives rise to glass cliff appointments by observing the conditions under which women are chosen to lead whenever groups experience a crisis. By comparing the leader selection practices of various societies and their impact on subsequent group performance, they can determine whether it is optimal to choose women leaders when a crisis is intraorganizational (e.g., mistrust among ingroup members) as opposed to interorganizational (e.g., threat of attack by outgroup members). One possibility might be to compare the recruiting practices of modern industrialized societies with those of pre-industrialized ones that bestow both sexes with commensurate power and authority. Electing to study some societies in which women are considered as capable as men to assume leadership might be a prudent first step over exploring others that have a stricter division of labor. According to Low, tribal and band societies that are characterized by women who wield significant influence include the Creek of the southern US, the Bemba of northeastern Zimbabwe, and the Ashanti of south Ghana. In each of these, men and women appear to have equal decision-making influence. In crisis situations affecting either of these societies, researchers could model the costs and benefits for women being assigned to leadership roles. They could frame the study in terms of decision rules or conditional strategies such as the following: "If the crisis calls for mending interpersonal strife within the group and as long as it is not too intense, choose the female candidate; otherwise, if the crisis involves settling a dispute between neighboring groups, select the male candidate". Testing hypotheses would then require using mathematical models to predict the optimal behavioral pattern in a given circumstance, and revising them to include other variables or tradeoffs to achieve better fit. As with all behavioral ecology models, to investigate glass cliffs, one would need to specify a goal (e.g., quell internal conflict or achieve intergroup victory), a currency that gages the costs and benefits of implementing the decision (e.g., difference in outcomes from choosing either leader), a set of constraints that characterize the context (e.g., crisis intensity), and a decision (e.g., leader selection, female or male). Behavioral ecologists would then be able to test Tinbergen's hypotheses related to a behavioral pattern's survival value or function by providing insight to the question, "what advantage(s) did choosing a woman leader in a particular crisis type and intensity provide the group's descendants in the struggle to survive and reproduce?"

Some may argue that the sexes need not have equal power and authority for women to be preferentially chosen to lead during a crisis. Potential glass cliff processes merit investigation as long as women can be trusted to take on any leadership position in spite of its frequency, its degree of formality, or even its accompanying influence. This would also broaden the scope of settings in which one could directly observe and interview community members (for a comprehensive list of over 180 existing societies featuring remnants of earlier modes of living). Another possibility is to compare industrialized societies in the extent to which they promote women's leadership during crisis situations. Research on work-related values has revealed that modern cultures differ in the differentiation of gender roles or what has become known as the masculinity-femininity cultural dimension of work values. While masculine societies support male dominance and economic performance (e.g., Japan, Mexico), feminine cultures accept gender-role fluidity and emphasize quality of life (e.g., Scandinavian countries). This cultural difference may help to explain the preponderance of women on Norwegian corporate boards (almost 36%) over those on Japanese boards (less than 4%). A recent meta-analysis examined the extent to which stereotypes of leaders are culturally masculine, and found that masculine construals of leadership are decreasing over time partly due to the increasing number of women leaders and, consequently, the propagation of a more androgynous concept of leadership. Participation of women in national parliaments is on the rise globally (Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2015) and, while this may reduce bias toward current and potential female leaders, it might also exacerbate their likelihood of being given failing mandates.

Cultural Evolution

The idea that culture consists of variants that compete with one another similar to the ways in which alleles or genotypes compete began with the work of human geneticists on cultural inheritance. Like behavioral ecologists, cultural evolutionists build models based on theoretical traditions of evolutionary biology but instead tailor them to the unique processes of culture. Since some cultural traits are more likely to spread than others, they can explain and predict patterns of change and diversity. Culture is defined as knowledge, beliefs, values, and attitudes capable of affecting individuals' behavior acquired from others through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission. Once culture is framed as "packages" of learned information, the processes by which variants of these packages change in frequency in a given population can be studied. Cultural variants differ from genes in some respects. First, they can be transmitted not only vertically from parents to offspring, but also obliquely from older to younger generations, and horizontally from one person to another (e.g., from siblings, friends, and peers). Second, unlike genes, some cultural variants are adopted by people while others are rejected, a process known as biased cultural transmission or cultural selection. Whereas biased transmission depends on the inner workings of the minds of cultural learners or imitators, natural selection depends on the extent to which different genes can survive and reproduce with little regard to human preferences. Cultural evolution is nevertheless a Darwinian process by which particular socially learned benefits, or pieces of knowledge, increase or decrease in frequency owing to being adopted by individuals at different rates. Evidence that cultural evolution is a biological process comes from studies showing that cultural information varies from person to person, competes for survival against other ideas, and is inherited by subsequent generations.

Most models in the social sciences postulate that gender differences in behavior emerge as a result of learning. Among the theories receiving the most prominence in the leadership literature is Eagly's social role theory which proposes that external social pressures and cultural expectations guide individuals to adopt behaviors that are consistent with one's gender. Individuals then internalize these expectations and become motivated to act consistently over time. What constitutes "proper gender behavior" in a specific culture, then, could be interpreted as one of many variants of cultural information having been transmitted intergenerationally and having survived because it was adopted by the majority. Therefore, men and women engage in behaviors that ascribe to gender stereotypes largely because these distinct roles have been transmitted through the generations. Consider the case of empathic behaviors. Like all trait-based behaviors, these vary between individuals. Second, they compete against other behaviors such as selfishly looking after oneself at the detriment of others. And third, these behaviors are imitable and thus can be passed on to members of the next generation who benefitted directly from these empathic behaviors. As such, one would expect empathy to be transmitted culturally similar to how it is transmitted genetically. Under cultural evolution, one could surmise that women's empathy advantage over men evolved through the transmission of social expectations and reinforced by the actual empathic behaviors of female caregivers toward group members. Empathy, as shown earlier, comprises a multitude of constructs some of which are behavioral (e.g., helping), affective (e.g., personal distress), and cognitive (e.g., perspective taking). Collectively, each of these can be seen as a variant of information about a person. Due to biased transmission, it is possible that some variants outshone others and became accepted as information worthy of being communicated to others. Regardless of how these cultural variants competed with one another, the broader core idea or cultural package of "women-are-more-empathic-than-men" was reconstructed time and time again. Research shows that in most societies, females are the more person-oriented sex and female leaders in particular are more communal (e.g., affection, interpersonal sensitivity) compared to their agentic male peers (e.g., assertiveness, dominance). Although differences in women's empathy advantage over men vary cross-culturally, the existence of such an advantage seems undeniable. If one accepts that women-as-empathizers constitutes one package, then perceiving them in this light might be another package that evolved through reinforcement. Should the case be that women continue to behave more empathically than men over time, then the collective expectation will most certainly perpetuate this notion.

Cultural information is not obtained exclusively from our direct experiences but also through vicarious learning. Researchers have contributed a wealth of knowledge regarding both the nature of stereotypes and the impact they have on decision making, while they have only begun to ask how cultural stereotypes form in the first place. In a recent experimental study, Martin et al. reconstructed the process through which social information is passed on repeatedly from one individual to another, i.e., via a linear diffusion chain. They first presented one participant (Generation 1) with images of various cartoon-like alien beings each having different shapes and colors, as well as different traits used to describe people (e.g., arrogant, curious, tidy). They then asked the participant to recall as much information about the aliens as possible and to relay these "alien-attribute packages" to a second participant (Generation 2), and so on, until communication was transmitted sequentially to a seventh participant (Generation 7). Therefore, the study's social-transmission element involved taking the recalled information from one participant and using it as training material for the next generation. Findings showed that when social information is conveyed sequentially, people improved in their ability to remember the attributes associated with a social target because the task became increasingly simplified through both the loss of some attributes escaping memory and the development of a systematic categorical structure. By the time the information had reached the last generation, for example, blue aliens were predominantly "sensible," whereas green ones were "vulgar," even when direct experience with these was absent. As such, Martin et al. demonstrated that complex and random information about people becomes simplified, consistent, and systematic as it passes through communicators' cognitive limitations and biases. Through a process of "cumulative cultural evolution", this information develops into a form that could be easily retrieved and accurately transmitted. With women's rising participation in upper managerial echelons, and with some women assuming positions that had never before been occupied by a member of their sex, there is a risk that new stereotypes may originate and evolve.

Thus far, we employed multiple evolutionary approaches to explain why women tend to be selected over men to lead in times of crisis and we have made a reasonable case for empathy's role in this regard. As culture evolves, however, so do our genes and most would agree that genes and culture play a dual role in explaining behavior. Much value would therefore be gained if glass cliff phenomena were explained using both genetic and cultural evolutionary approaches in tandem, a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts. The latest evolutionary approach to have been developed, namely gene-culture coevolution, promises to offer such added value to our understanding, a prospect we turn to in greater detail next.