Caregivers at Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda, who had known the animals for an average of 12 years, settled the order of one group’s hierarchy among themselves, from the alpha male down to the lowest-ranking individual. In a new study of chimpanzee risk-taking, caregivers also rated each animal’s willingness to take risks on a scale from 0 to 4. Animals in the top fifth of their group’s hierarchy averaged 2.8, against 1.5 for the lowest-ranking animals (Fig. 1g).
Most readers already believe that leaders are bold, and they tend to attach that belief to careers and corporations: the entrepreneur, the executive who bets the company. The authors begin from that business-press assumption and ask whether the link is older than modern organizations. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), which live in large hierarchical groups where status is contested directly, are their test case.
What did the study find about leaders and risk?
The paper is a short communication in The Leadership Quarterly1 by Lou M. Haux, Kamil Fulawka, Gert G. Wagner, Ralph Hertwig, and Esther Herrmann, published online on 7 September 2026. It reports that willingness to take risks is positively associated with leadership status in people and with hierarchical rank in chimpanzees, and that the association is much stronger in the apes.
The authors standardized risk scores within each species, so a coefficient (β) is a change measured in standard deviations. For human leadership, β = 0.26 (95% credible interval 0.23 to 0.30; this is the Bayesian counterpart of a confidence interval). For chimpanzee rank, β = 0.59 (0.42 to 0.76). Human income also tracked risk preference (β = 0.17), and males scored higher than females in both species. None of the leadership measures interacted with sex, so male and female leaders showed the same tilt toward risk.
This post is about whether I believe the chimpanzee half of that result. I believe part of it.
