A study led by Lou Marie Haux at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development has found that people holding leadership positions, and chimpanzees ranked higher in their social groups, both show a greater willingness to take risks than their lower-status counterparts. The work, published in The Leadership Quarterly, paired German household survey data with caregiver assessments of sanctuary chimpanzees in Uganda and Kenya, according to The Brighter Side of News. The researchers describe the overlap as a possible sign of evolutionary continuity, while stressing that their methods cannot show that risk appetite produces leaders.
Why it matters
The findings touch a question that applies well beyond academia: whether a taste for uncertainty has long shaped who rises in a social group, in human organizations as much as in chimpanzee communities. If the same pattern appears in both species, it suggests the link between status and risk tolerance may predate modern workplaces. At the same time, the study's design leaves the direction of the relationship open. The authors do not claim that risk-taking makes anyone a leader, and they did not examine whether risk-tolerant leaders perform better.
How the human data was built
The human side of the analysis drew on Germany's Socio-Economic Panel, a long-running household study. The researchers used records from 40,127 participants, who together supplied 153,430 yearly observations between 2015 and 2020. Respondents were between 18 and 105 years old, and 20,904 of them were women. Forty-four people who did not give a usable answer on risk preference were left out of the outcome models.
Participants rated their overall readiness to take risks on a scale running from zero to 10. They also stated whether they held a leadership role at the time and gave details on earned income. The Brighter Side of News notes that these were self-reported attitudes and job circumstances, not records of specific risky choices made at work.
The team sorted respondents into three groups: those who never reported a leadership role, those who reported one in some years, and those who held a role across all six years. The last group averaged 6.2 on the risk scale, while those who never reported leadership averaged 4.96. The researchers present this as a difference between groups rather than an effect produced by being promoted. Age and gender were taken into account in the human analysis.
Income showed its own pattern. People with higher average earnings also reported more risk tolerance, though the researchers analyzed income separately from leadership status. More than a third of the yearly income observations were missing, and people without a usable income record were placed in the same category as those reporting no income.
Caregiver ratings of 86 chimpanzees
The chimpanzee sample covered 49 animals at Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda and 37 at Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya. The animals were between two and 40 years old, and 47 were female. They lived in three mixed-sex groups spread across the two sites.
Seventeen caregivers rated how willing each animal was to take risks. Most of these caregivers had known the chimpanzees for years, giving them a view of behavior that went beyond a single observation. The ratings covered foraging, reactions to snakes, leaving familiar territory, competition over rank, contact with unfamiliar humans and general risk-taking. The researchers combined the assessments into risk-preference scores.
A separate set of ten caregivers judged where each chimpanzee stood in its group hierarchy, either through group discussion or by pooling individual rankings. Agreement among the caregivers was high, which the researchers take as support for consistency, though the ratings remain impressions rather than direct measurements of every behavior.
Higher-ranked chimpanzees received higher risk-taking scores, and the pattern held across most of the domains assessed. One area stood apart: willingness to trust strangers. That exception led the researchers to caution that social trust should not be treated as simply another form of risk tolerance.
This portion of the work relied on ratings rather than experiments that changed the risks the animals actually faced. Such assessments can capture behavior across many situations, but caregiver impressions may still color the scores. Strong agreement among observers supports reliability without resolving every question about what the ratings capture.
Comparing species, and the limits of the comparison
The link between status and risk preference came out stronger in the chimpanzees than in the humans. To make the comparison, the researchers standardized risk scores within each species, expressing differences relative to each sample. That step helps compare statistical patterns, but it does not put the questionnaires or the social roles on equal footing.
The measures differ in basic ways. Humans described their own preferences, while caregivers described the chimpanzees. A workplace leadership post and monthly earnings are not the same thing as dominance rank in an animal group. The authors describe their measures as species-appropriate stand-ins for leadership-related social position, not as identical measures of leadership.
Average risk preference was higher among males than females in both samples. Even so, the models found no evidence that the link between status and risk preference varied by sex or gender. As the researchers frame it, that result concerns the relationship between two measures, not a finding that every group shared the same average attitudes.
The study also left open whether risk-tolerant individuals make better decisions or lead more effectively. Holding a position, steering a group's movements and delivering good results are separate questions. A connection to status, in other words, says nothing on its own about the value of any particular risk.
The repeated human observations did allow the team to look more closely at people whose leadership status shifted over time. An exploratory analysis covered 1,300 participants who reported periods both in and out of leadership roles, contributing 6,611 annual observations.
The Brighter Side of News reports that the study cannot establish cause and effect. What comes next is likely to depend on research designs that track people and animals as their status changes, or that test risk behavior directly rather than relying on self-reports and caregiver impressions. Until then, the parallel between boardrooms and chimpanzee groups remains a correlation, and a suggestive one, rather than proof that risk appetite builds leaders.
