Dr. Nicholas Wright

Yeah, Ben, thanks so much for having me on.

So I think the first thing to say is that all human societies are hierarchical.

There is always a hierarchy.

And by a social hierarchy, I mean that can obviously come from many different traits that people might have.

It might be sort of physical strength.

It might be...

It might be something to do with the religious, you know, where you are in a caste system, for example, or whatever it might be.

But there will always be some form of social hierarchy.

There will always be leaders and there will always be followers.

And that is baked into how our brains work.

And so our brains have very specific areas that see exactly where we are in these social hierarchies.

Now, in terms of the leaders and followers, we know that some people actually, in fact, quite a lot of people do not want to assume responsibility for others.

They don't want to take on a leadership position.

And we can see where this happens in the brain.

And actually, what we can see is that when people

are given the opportunity to shoulder responsibility for others, often they are averse to it.

And when we scan their brains and then we can see where people are more likely to be averse to shouldering responsibility for others, we can then actually then correlate that to real world

tests of their leadership.

So for example, there was a great study done in Switzerland and they were able to scan people's brains and they looked to see where they had reached in the military ranks within the Swiss military.

And so for all those reasons, there will always be leaders and there will always be followers.