Risk-taking tracks leadership in both humans and chimpanzees, study finds

A new comparative study has found that the link between a willingness to take risks and holding a position of leadership shows up in both humans and chimpanzees, though it is considerably stronger among the apes. The research, drawn from a German national survey of more than 40,000 people and from caregiver ratings of 86 sanctuary chimpanzees, was published this week in The Leadership Quarterly.

The paper, titled "Human and chimpanzee leaders are more risk-loving," is by Lou M. Haux of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Kamil Fulawka of the Technical University of Dresden, Gert G. Wagner and Ralph Hertwig, also of the Max Planck Institute, and Esther Herrmann of the University of Portsmouth. It appears in the journal's October 2026 issue, with an early online release on September 7.

For the human side of the comparison, the researchers used the German Socio-Economic Panel, or SOEP, a long-running representative survey coordinated by the German Institute for Economic Research, DIW Berlin, that has tracked tens of thousands of households since 1984. Respondents who reported holding a leadership role, whether in a workplace, an organization or another setting, also reported higher general risk tolerance on average than those who did not. Risk preference rose with income as well, and the leadership-risk relationship held for both men and women, though men reported somewhat higher risk tolerance overall.

For the chimpanzee side, the team drew on assessments from longtime caregivers at chimpanzee sanctuaries in East Africa, who rated each of 86 animals on willingness to take risks using the same kind of personality-rating approach primate researchers have used in earlier studies of chimpanzee temperament. Those risk ratings were then compared against each chimpanzee's social rank within its group, as judged by the same caregivers and by behavioral observation. Higher-ranking chimpanzees were rated as substantially more risk-prone than lower-ranking ones, and the strength of that association was markedly greater than the comparable one found in the human data.

A pattern seen across two species, one much more pronounced

The authors frame the comparison as a test of whether risk-taking is a general feature of leadership that predates the human species, rather than a product of modern institutions such as corporations, governments or the military. Risk preference and social dominance have each been studied extensively on their own, in humans and in other primates, but pairing survey data from tens of thousands of people with direct behavioral ratings of a comparable ape sample, within a single analysis, is unusual.

Chimpanzees establish rank through direct physical contest, coalition-building and displays of strength, and a disposition toward risk could plausibly help an individual climb or hold that hierarchy. Human societies, by contrast, offer other, less physically dangerous routes into leadership, including education, credentials, seniority and election. The authors argue that this difference in how leadership is attained and transmitted may explain why the risk-leadership link, while present in both species, is so much weaker in humans.

The work builds on earlier research by overlapping authors, including a 2023 study in Psychological Science that examined risk-taking across the chimpanzee lifespan using data from the same kind of sanctuary populations in Uganda and Kenya. That earlier work found that chimpanzee risk appetite behaves like a stable personality trait, is generally higher in males, and peaks in young adulthood, a pattern the authors note has parallels in human risk-taking research. The new paper extends that line of work by tying risk disposition directly to social rank and, for the first time in this research program, to a matched analysis of human leadership status using a large, publicly documented national dataset.

Caution about cause and effect

The authors are explicit that the study establishes an association, not a causal mechanism. Haux said the findings point to a possible deep history behind the trait.

"The results suggest that the link between leadership and risk-taking may have deep evolutionary roots."

At the same time, Haux cautioned against reading the correlation as proof that risk-takers are born leaders or that leadership itself pushes people toward risk. "Our findings establish a correlation, not a causal relationship," Haux said, adding that it remains unclear whether people who are already inclined to take risks are more likely to be chosen for leadership roles, or whether taking on a leadership role changes how much risk a person is willing to tolerate. The SOEP's longitudinal structure, which follows the same individuals over many years, offered some suggestive evidence that elevated risk tolerance tends to appear before a person moves into a leadership position, but the authors say that pattern needs dedicated follow-up work before any causal claim can be made.

The findings sit within a broader academic debate in organizational psychology and leadership studies over how much of leadership behavior is shaped by innate temperament versus structural and cultural factors, such as how organizations select and promote people. A cross-species correlation of this kind does not resolve that debate, but it adds evidence that risk tolerance is at least one of the ingredients that recurs across very different systems for choosing leaders, from an ape hierarchy settled through physical contest to a modern bureaucracy or company board.

What comes next, including other great apes

The research group has said it intends to examine whether the same pattern, a positive link between risk tolerance and social rank, holds among bonobos, the chimpanzee's closest living relative and a species whose social structure differs from that of chimpanzees in notable ways, including a more prominent role for females in group hierarchies. A comparison across chimpanzees, bonobos and humans would let the researchers test whether the strength of the risk-leadership link tracks how directly physical a species' competition for status tends to be.

For now, the authors say the clearest takeaway is methodological as much as substantive: directly comparable measures of risk preference and leadership status, collected in parallel from a large human sample and a modest but detailed ape sample, make it possible to ask evolutionary questions about leadership that survey data alone, or animal behavior data alone, could not answer.