Interesting; it seemed to me that combat in the ancestral environment would be the main case where the tribe would shut up about status for five seconds and allow fighters to get stuff done.
That might be what you'd expect, but what we actually see is that militaries have explicitly tracked status (rank), and strong enforcement of that status (orders), and it's been that way for at least as long as we have records. They also tend to have the death penalty for a wider variety of things, including for attempting to leave (deserting), for which there is a strong incentive that applies to everyone at once with a shared but varying strength.
Another interesting fact about warfare is that it makes tribalism a simple classification problem (my side/th...
During a discussion today about the bizarre "can't get crap done" phenomenon that afflicts large fractions of our community, the suggestion came up that most people can't do anything where there is a perceived choice that includes the null option / "do nothing" as an option. Of which Michael Vassar made the following observation:
And if you're not the leader, it is not good for your reproductive fitness to act like one. In modern times the penalties for standing up are much lower, but our instincts haven't updated.
Interesting to reconsider the events of "To lead, you must stand up" in this light. It makes more sense if you read it as "None of those people had instincts saying it was a good idea to declare themselves the leader of the monkey tribe, in order to solve this particular coordination problem where 'do nothing' felt like a viable option" instead of "nobody had the initiative".