Dr. Christopher R. von Rueden

Dr. Christopher von Rueden looks at leadership through the lens of cultural and evolutionary anthropology. An anthropologist with expertise in traditional human societies, his research focuses on how humans form status hierarchies, why we evolved to do so, and the demographic and ecological factors that cause our hierarchies to be more or less coercive. Relatedly, he studies the role of leader-follower relationships in the evolution of human cooperation.

At the Jepson School, von Rueden teaches courses such as Theories and Models of Leadership and Sex, Leadership, and the Evolution of Human Societies.

In addition to his work on status and leadership, he has published on topics such as why humans differ in personality traits and cross-cultural variation in parenting and in gendered divisions of labor.

He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Tsimané forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Bolivia, and more recently, with Himba pastoralists of northern Namibia. His work with the Tsimané is part of a larger project (the Tsimané Health and Life History Project) that investigates aging, health, and social behavior in a small-scale human population.

Through his affiliations with the Santa Fe Institute and the Culture and the Mind Project, von Rueden has investigated social networks and wealth inheritance in traditional human societies and cross-cultural variation in moral decision-making, respectively. He serves on the board of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society and is president of One Pencil Project, an NGO providing educational resources to indigenous populations in Bolivia and Namibia. 

He received a doctorate in anthropology, with an emphasis in cognitive science, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Harvard University. To learn more about von Rueden's scholarship and teaching, visit his personal website.