Tag: Prestige

Scientific Publication

The hidden cost of power: How dominant leaders inadvertently promote unethical behaviour

In 2015, the revelation that Volkswagen had been gaming emissions tests shook the corporate world. The deception involved 11 million diesel cars being fitted with a ‘defeat device’, which masked the emissions released by these vehicles when they detected they were undergoing testing, but otherwise polluted at levels flagrantly beyond legal limits. Since being busted, Volkswagen has paid more than $39 billion in fines to compensate for this large-scale fraud, and the pollution released by these vehicles is believed to have significantly damaged the health of children exposed to it.

Martin Winterkorn, the then CEO of Volkswagen, who has since been ousted over this scandal, had elevated the company to the top of the auto industry, and was widely seen as a good leader. However, Winterkorn also carried a reputation for his controlling and intimidating demeanour. “There was always a distance, a fear”, a former Volkswagen executive confided, reliving the sense of dread he experienced when facing Winterkorn. “If he would come and visit or you had to go to him, your pulse would go up”.

The Volkswagen emissions scandal raises a critical question: can leaders’ management style, whilst not directly encouraging unethical behaviour, still inadvertently promote it? This sets the scene for a deeper exploration of leadership outlined in “More Than Meets the Eye: The Unintended Consequence of Leader Dominance Orientation on Subordinate Ethicality“, a paper authored by Doctor Garrett Brady and Professor Niro Sivanathan at London Business School, which was recently published in the journal Organizational Science.

Through a series of studies, Garrett Brady and Niro Sivanathan sought to understand the profound ways in which leaders’ behaviours and actions sway employees, and mould social norms within commercial entities. More specifically, their paper investigated how perceptions of the moral character of business leaders can shift the ethical foundations a company has been built on.

Brady and Sivanathan draw on the time-tested wisdom of evolutionary theory to make sense of such phenomena. Whilst we often attribute our species’ success to our innate intelligence, our superpower is really our razor sharp social skills. Over eons, the human brain has been sculpted by the forces of natural selection to help us navigate our social worlds, including forming alliances and succeeding in status games. Through their in-depth explorations into the origins and functions of leadership, evolutionary psychologists have circled in on two distinct paths that people pursue to climb the social ladder.

Firstly, there’s dominance—asserting one’s status through force, intimidation, and coercion. This type of leadership is ancient, and traces back millions of years through our primate heritage. Throughout the natural world, animals that are the most powerful and menacing fighters are usually granted high status (if you don’t believe me, watch David Attenborough’s latest documentary series).

In the tree of life, human and chimpanzee lineages split off from their common ancestor approximately 5 to 7 million years ago. Our shared evolutionary heritage explains why, like our primate cousins, we humans roam our social worlds being exquisitely sensitive to signs of dominance.

However, the story of leadership is not so straightforward when we home in on homosapiens. Unlike other animals, we humans are a cultural species. We need to be socialised, and critically depend on collective knows for our very survival (how long would you be able to survive if you found yourself lost and all alone in the wilderness?). As a result, we seek leaders with the knowledge and skills that our groups need to survive and thrive. This path to leadership is very different than what you typically see in a wildlife documentary, and is aptly called prestige.

Intriguingly, scientific research suggests both paths appear to be equally effective ways of gaining status. That is, one can climb to the top of the tree through primal dominance, or by inspiring others with prestige (although dominance has a shorter shelf-life, and appears to be counterproductive for women).

As with all things in life, there are trade-offs involved. Dominant leaders are often praised for acting swiftly and decisively, and they are also people’s choice when our groups are under attack (if your country was on the verge of being invaded, who would you rather have as your Commander in Chief, George W. Bush, or Angela Merkel?). That said, dominant leaders also come with a hefty price tag: demoralised employees, reduced creativity, and in turn, people clamouring to leave. Through their series of studies, Brady and Sivanathan reveal another hidden cost dominant leaders charge to their firms: dominant leaders’ desire to assert control can, unintentionally, encourage unethical behaviour to spread.

To detect the ripple effects of leaders’ dominance, Brady and Sivanathan used a range of scientific instruments available at their disposal. Initially, they surveyed a cohort of managers, based in India, and their direct reports. In total, 150 managers were surveyed, spanning 23 industries, along with 600 of their employees. What insights did this generate? Employees who reported into domineering managers stated that they were more likely to engage in unethical acts where they work (a candid admission, I know).

Extending this line of inquiry using a longitudinal study, Brady and Sivanathan surveyed 384 employees, twice, over a period of two weeks. By meticulously sifting through quantitative data, they documented a chain reaction of managers behaving in a domineering manner, where excessive dominance caused their teams not only to expect such behaviour from their leaders, but, consequently, to deem unethical actions committed by their team members as more permissible.

Perhaps employees’ anxieties and their sense of fairness explain this relationship between leaders’ dominance and the ethical conduct of their teams? Given authoritarian leaders like to rule with an iron fist, subordinates may engage in unethical practises because of the buckling pressure they are subject to, and the resentment boiling beneath their collars. Whilst Brady and Sivanathan did find evidence of people engaging in unethical behaviours at work out of indignation, they also found that perceptions of leaders’ dominance was strongly associated with employees saying that their leader is more likely to engage in unethical behaviour, and in turn, seeing such unethical actions as acceptable behaviour themselves.

To move beyond mere correlations, a clever experiment was set up. Brady and Sivanathan exposed their human guinea pigs (in this case, 550 Americans recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk) to a brief video of an actor welcoming a cohort of new joiners to their fictitious firm, varying their host’s degree of prestige or dominance. Those that watched the dominant leader bossing people around during this induction session concluded that their host lacked virtue. Crucially, they also believed that violating norms within this hypothetical work environment would be deemed more acceptable.

To make sure that their study was watertight, Brady and Sivanathan also conducted a laboratory experiment. 293 lucky individuals were invited to a laboratory based in the UK, and placed under the direction of a dominant or prestigious facilitator. They were made to believe that they were supporting research for a fake company, and were asked to correct some coding errors as quickly as possible. Unbeknown to the participants, several of these coding errors were impossible to solve. In support of their hypotheses, they found that participants being facilitated by a dominant leader lied more about the amount of coding errors they were able to solve, and were more likely to say that ‘lots of other people misreport the numbers’. Additional studies strengthened these observations, revealing that teams under the command of dominant leaders were more likely to act unethically, and to see such behaviour as the norm.

Brady and Sivanathan’s comprehensive studies suggests that leaders’ dominance is more than just a management style; it’s a powerful pulse that reverberates throughout the workplace. Leaders that project dominance can cast a shadow of questionable ethics, encouraging behaviours amongst their employees that mirror their hazy morals. In contrast, prestigious leaders, with their power to inspire people and genuine concern for the welfare of their group, may foster a more ethical climate.

What are the practical implications of their paper? By default, most companies looking to enhance the ethical conduct of their employees will roll-out interventions targeted at individuals, including bite-sized, solitary, ethics training. Whilst this may seem sensible on the surface, such initiatives are woefully adequate. In light of these research findings, business executives, compliance professionals, and their supervisors, need to zero in on social norms, and the complex interaction between leaders and the cultural evolution they set in motion. In other words, they need to deploy more sophisticated, and scientific, ‘behavioural risk management’.

Brady and Sivanathan encourage companies to install what they term a robust ‘ethical infrastructure’. “Boards may be aware of leaders they recognize as exerting influence via dominance. While they may be happy with these leaders’ work so far, they should take steps to combat potentially unfounded inferences that subordinates make.” Whilst reemphasising high ethical standards is important, a stronger statement would be to reign in these leaders in through executive coaching, or, if these efforts prove to be futile and more drastic action is deemed necessary, to ask them to leave.

The authors stress that their findings are confined to the workplace. However, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how these dynamics can manifest in other critical spheres of society, such as political governance and the military. Looking at the extreme end of the scale, human history is scarred by conflicts and atrocities often linked to the unchecked primal dominance of psychopathic leaders. Appreciating the stakes involved, Brady and Sivanathan’s research serves as a timely reminder for organisations to resist the allure of dominant leaders.

In summary, Brady and Sivanathan’s paper forces us to rethink who we should appoint to run our institutions. Such reflections are particularly important during times of uncertainty, where dominant figures frequently rise from the ashes to promise us law and order. The hidden costs of such leaders, including the potential for creating a work environment ripe for misconduct, is becoming increasingly evident.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

Image credit: Alexander Koerner/ Getty Images.

Book Review

The Status Game, by Will Storr

Do you ever get a niggling feeling that other people are doing better than you? Don’t worry, we all do.

In his new book The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It, Will Storr reveals the hidden force that triggers much of our anxiety: social status. From our hunter-gatherer ancestors who roamed the African Savannah, to the office workers and internet communities of the 21st century, Storr argues that the human need for status is ancient, universal, and remains deeply ingrained in all of us.

Will Storr is an award-winning journalist and author, who also runs a successful writing course based on his last book, The Science of Storytelling. That Storr has now turned his attention to the psychology of status may initially raise some eyebrows. Storr clarifies that while The Science of Storytelling thrusts our ‘self-serving inner-hero’ into the spotlight, The Status Game reveals the status seeking ‘mechanism’ that lurks behind the scenes. “If the conscious experience is organised as a story, this book concerns the subconscious truth that lies beneath it”

In The Status Game, Storr clarifies that status seeking isn’t a frivolous activity: it’s intricately intertwined with our ultimate evolutionary goals. For all social creatures on planet Earth, high status brings abundance: finer food, more land, and more romantic opportunities (for men at least). “The higher we rise, the more likely we are to live, love and procreate. It’s the essence of human thriving. It’s the status game.”

The psychological toll of being at the bottom may be obvious. Less intuitive is how our rung on the social ladder affects our bodies. Like monkeys sitting atop their troop’s dominance hierarchy, high status men and women are generally healthier and live longer than their underlyings (although male baboons show that life at the top can be tough too). Painstaking studies conducted with British civil servants suggest this has less to do with the privileges that comes with affluence, but rather our relative rank. “To our brains, status is a resource as real as oxygen or water”, Storr writes. “When we lost it, we break.”

Success, virtue and dominance

In The Status Game, Storr reveals the doubled-edged nature of human status seeking, documenting how striving fuels the best and worst aspects of humanity. Whilst scientists and inventors wanting to make a name for themselves drives human progress, people’s desire to get ahead of the competition also results in murder, war, and even genocide. How do we make sense of status seeking’s mixed scorecard?

Unlike any other animal, we are fully fledged cultural species. We need to be socialised from the moment that we’re born, and we rely on collective wisdom for our survival (how long could you survive on your own in the wilderness?). As a result, we grant people with the expertise our group needs to succeed with high status—a path to success aptly called prestige.

Success and virtue games help explain the psychology of prestige. In success games, status is awarded for exceptional achievements that demonstrate skill and talent in established contests (think of professional sports and tech start-ups). In virtue games, status is awarded to people who are conspicuously moralistic, obedient, and dutiful (think of religious or royal institutions).  

Although prototypical forms of prestige have been identified in wildlife, such as elder elephants leading their herds to water, no other species has stretched the psychology of prestige as far as we humans have. As stated by Storr; “prestige is our most marvellous craving.”

Despite our species’ championing of prestige, we’ve never fully stamped out our primitive urge for dominance. That is, gaining status through intimidation, manipulation, and coercion. This type of leadership is ancient, and traces back millions of years to our primate heritage. In the tree of life, human and chimpanzee lineages split off from their common ancestor approximately 5 to 7 million years ago. With this, both primate species took with them a proclivity for dominance hierarchies, and a psychology hypersensitive to dominance.

As stated by Storr:

Whilst the prestige games of virtue and success have made us gentler and wiser animals, the superior modes of playing haven’t completely overwritten our bestial capacities. As psychologist professor Dan McAdams writes, ‘the human expectation that social status can be seized through brute force and intimidation, that the strongest and the biggest and boldest will lord it over the rank and file, is very old, awesomely intuitive and deeply ingrained. Its younger rival – prestige- was never able to dislodge dominance from the human mind.’

Intriguingly, prestige and dominance both appear to be equally effective ways of gaining status. That is, one can rise to the top either by being virtuous and attaining mastery, or by throwing one’s weight around. The crucial difference is that prestigious leaders have been freely chosen by their followers, whereas domineering players typically force people to respect them.

Playing with fire

Across cultures, manhood is widely seen as something that has to be earned, but can also easily be lost (when was the last time you heard someone be told to ‘woman up’?). Because of the precarious nature of manhood, Storr underscores how young men are particularly prone to violent status contests.

Men have a propensity for physical status contests built into their minds, muscles and bones. They’re overwhelmingly the perpetrators of murder, and comprise most of their victims, with around 90% of global homicides being committed by males, and 70% being their targets. In the majority of cases, killers are unemployed, unmarried, poorly educated and under 30. Their sense of status is fragile. In most places, the leading reasons given for killing are ‘status driven’, writes conflict researcher doctor Mike Martin, ‘the result of altercations over trivial disputes’.

Needless to say, not all young men are violent criminals, and culture plays a big role in regulating aggression. However, Storr zeros in on combination he believes blows the powder keg: having a grandiose personality and experiencing intense feelings of humiliation. What’s the connection? Being humiliated is to have your reputation shattered, where your status plummets publicly and in dramatic fashion. “Humiliation can be seen as the opposite of status, the hell to its heaven.”

In the most serious cases, Storr says we sink so far down the rankings that we’re no longer considered useful players. The only way to recover is to start afresh and rebuild from the ground up. However, there’s another option available for those who are slipping and can’t get themselves up: annihilation.

As the African proverb says, ‘the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth’. If the game rejects you, you can return in dominance as a vengeful God, using deadly violence to force the game to attend to you in humility.

Talk of burning villages down may evoke images of The Joker, but young male ‘incels’ are no laughing matter. Storr provides a harrowing account of three mass murderers: the ‘co-ed’ serial killer Edmund Kemper, who remains one of America’s most notorious murderers; Elliot Rogers, who was responsible for the misogynistic terror attacks in Vista California; and ‘the Unabomber’, Ted Kaczynski. Through his combing of the forensic evidence, Storr reveals how each of these men were not only delusionally narcissistic (Storr avoids making armchair diagnoses and sticks to the term ‘grandiose’ instead), but were also subject to a crushing weight of humiliation.

From left to right: Elliot Rodger, Ed Kemper, and Ted Kaczynski. Image credit: Quillette (2021).

Of course, several other factors contributed to these men committing such heinous crimes, including the dire state of their mental health. However, Storr argues that mental illness is not a sufficient explanation, as almost everyone who suffers from such conditions are not hellbent on destroying their communities. As stated by Storr:

All three had a need for status that was unusually, perhaps pathologically fierce, and so the humiliations they suffered would’ve been all the more agonising . . . Feeling entitled to a place at the top of the game, they were driven to depravity by life at the bottom.

Learning from history

These powerful undercurrents of grandiosity and humiliation are not confined to dangerous criminals. Storr also spots this sense of entitlement and gnawing resentment in notorious acts of espionage, sabotage, and amongst extreme political movements. Most poignantly, Storr draws parallels with the rise of Nazi Germany.

In attempting to understand the successes of the Nazi Party, Storr implores us to be brave. “The Nazi catastrophe can’t be understood without acknowledgement of why the Germans came to worship their leader as a god”.

Before the outbreak of World War One, Storr claims Germany was the most prosperous nation in Europe (edging ahead of Britain), where Germans’ living standards had been soaring since the turn of the 20th century. When war was declared, the Germans were confident (perhaps overconfident) that this would be a quick victory for the home team.

In the aftermath of Germany’s shocking defeat, Germans expected that the terms of peace would be just. However, the strict provisions that were enforced through The Treaty of Versaille included: 1) accepting blame for starting the war; 2) agreeing to disarm, whilst handing over enormous amounts of military equipment; 3) surrendering vast tracts of land and German territories; and 4) paying today’s equivalent of almost three hundred billion pounds in damages. These terms were almost unanimously felt as a national humiliation.

That Germany had to foot the bill for everyone’s war helped trigger a wave of hyperinflation that was so disastrous, workers had to collect their wages with wheelbarrows. These humiliations multiplied themselves. When Germany inevitably fell behind on its reparation payments, France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr Valley, one of Germany’s major industrial engines. Once hyperinflation had finally been tamed, the Great Depression hit. Germany was plunged into a deeper state of desperation and despair.

According to Storr, Adolf Hitler road on a ticket of healing the humiliations that Germany had endured through the asture terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Although antisemitism was rife at the time, Storr argues Germans’ main priority was restoring what they deemed was Germany’s rightful place at the top.

Partly through effective propaganda, Hitler himself became highly symbolic of the resurgent Germany; By the logic of the status game, he became sacred, the literal equivalent of a God, a figure that symbolised all that his players valued and who, in effect, was their status.

A parade of Nazi flags at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg, as exhibited in the Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of Will. Image credit: The Unaffiliated Critic (2017).

Genocide, Storr argues, is not just about the killing or ‘cleansing’ enemies. “They’re about healing the perpetrators’ wounded grandiosity with grotesque, therapeutic performances of dominance and humiliation.” The Holocaust, the Nazis’ systematic slaughtering of six million Jews across Europe, was scaled up when Germany’s war effort started going south, and continued right up until the end of the Second World War— just as Hitler’s house of cards was crumbling.

The Nazis, Storr proclaims, were just like Edmund Kemper, Elliot Rodger and Ted Kaczynski. “They told a self-serving story that explained their catastrophic lack of status justified its restoration in murderous attack”, Storr writes. “But it’s not just Germany that’s been possessed in this way. Nations the world over become dangerous when humiliated.”

Stepping back, what lessons should we take from The Status Game? By peering into the mind of murderers and murderous regimes, Storr reminds us of the ever present threat posed by tyranny. To make sure we’re not swept away by a visceral rush of dominance, Storr instructs us to continuously question if the groups we belong to are becoming too tight, too dogmatic, and too extreme. For example, Storr states if we’re ever made to feel that acts of violence are virtuous, that’s a red flag. “If we’re serious about ‘never again’ we must accept that tyranny isn’t a ‘left’ or a ‘right’ thing, it’s a human thing. It doesn’t arrive goose-stepping down streets in terrifying ranks, it seduces us with stories.”

Given our peers’ ability to warp our sense of reality, how do we actually know when our groups have become unhinged? The antidote, Storr argues, is to play several status games. In other words, to diversify risk and not put all your eggs in one basket. “People who appear brainwashed have invested too much of their identity in a single game”, Storr states. “If the game fails, or they become expelled, their identify– their very self– can disintegrate. No such risk can befall the player with a diversity of identities who plays diverse games.” Of course, being a member of many groups opens one’s eyes to different views, too.

Conversely, Storr advises us to practice warmth, competence and sincerity when navigating our status hierarchies. “When we’re warm, we imply we’re not going to use dominance; when sincere; we imply we’re going to play fairly; when competent, that we’re going to be valuable to the game itself”.

According to Storr, it’s all too easy to flash sparks of dominance in the heat of the moment, where we draw for force to influence others. However successful this may be initially, Storr stresses that overpowering people, through forms of intimidation or other means, isn’t a sustainable strategy. “The glowers, the sighs, the wails of complaint; such twitches of animalism might help us achieve some immediate goal, but they’ll also lead to our being de-ranked in the mind of others.”

Whilst reflecting on prestige’s sticking power, Storr points out that we all have status to give, and that the credit we can dole out is essentially limitless. “Creating small moments of prestige means always seeking opportunities to use it. Allowing others to feel statusful makes it more likely they’ll accept our influence.”

Like a herd of elephants being led to water, let us continue our miraculous journey and follow the winding path of prestige.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It is published by William Collins. Click here to buy a copy.

*Post updated 11th January 2022

Scientific Publication

The rise and fall of the dominant leader

Ranking people by their social status seems to come naturally to us humans. Indeed, social hierarchies are ubiquitous across cultures and throughout human history.

Social hierarchies have allowed humans to coordinate effectively, and enabled large groups to make decisions and address collective action problems.

Whether small-scale societies or industrialised nations, one can think of various hierarchical structures that have been the result of conflict and brute force. However, many forms of hierarchy are also the product of leaders being freely chosen. What isn’t well understood by social scientists is how people climb these more productive forms of hierarchy.

To put it another way, what strategies actually make a leader successful in modern organisations, and which of these is more successful over time?

Keeping in sync with the latest research, Daniel Redhead and his colleagues Joey Cheng, Charles Driver, Tom Foulsham and Rick O’Gorman have just published a study the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, that helps answer this question.

Two ways to the top

Before delving into the particulars of the study, we need to establish what scientists already know. What strategies are known by evolutionary psychologists to increase one’s rank in the social pecking order?

Firstly, there’s dominance– increasing one’s social status through intimidation, manipulation, and coercion. This type of leadership is ancient, and traces back millions of years to our primate heritage.

Throughout the natural world, animals which are the most powerful and menacing fighters are generally granted high status (if you’re not convinced, watch one of David Attenborough’s latest documentaries).

In the tree of life, human and chimpanzee lineages split off from their common ancestor approximately 5 to 7 million years ago. With this, both primate species took with them a proclivity for dominance hierarchies, and a psychology sensitive to dominance.

However, the story of leadership gets a bit more complicated when we home in on homo-sapiens. Unlike other animals, we are a cultural species. We need to be socialised, and depend on collective wisdom for our survival (how long would you be able to live on your own in the wilderness?). As a result, we seek leaders with the knowledge and skills that our group needs to succeed.

This path to leadership is very different than what you usually see in a wildlife documentary, and is aptly called prestige.

Intriguingly, research shows that both paths are equally effective ways of gaining status. That is, one can get to the top either through dominance, or by leading through prestige. What wasn’t known by social scientists is how these different strategies play out over time. In other words, which leadership style is more effective in newly formed groups, and which is more successful in the long-run.

Cue Daniel and his research team.

Brains over brawn

For a couple of reasons, Daniel and his colleagues suspected dominance wouldn’t be an effective leadership strategy over time.

They state:

We proposed that the context of time and place is fundamental to the nature of human dominance… Unlike non-human primates, physical strength and size are not necessarily the most essential determinants of victory during antagonistic contests between humans. The presence of allies and coalitions shrinks the perceived size and muscularity of a foe and the widespread development of lethal weaponry potentially neutralizes human physiological dominance.

Translation: we humans take out overbearing arseholes (tarnishing their reputation through gossip and ostracism. Or if stigma doesn’t do the trick, pelting rocks at them will).

The authors stress that there needs to be certain social and environmental conditions for dominance to be a viable way of gaining status. For example, if bullying and violence are prevalent in the social context one faces, then dominance may prove to be an effective strategy (indeed, it may also be an essential survival strategy).

Conversely, Daniel and his colleagues argue that prestige should be a universally effective way of gaining social status over time. Why? Because prestige is marked by the respect earned by others, which requires a leader to build and maintain a good reputation.

So how did they go about testing their hypotheses?

The researchers used newly formed groups of American students to see how effective dominance and prestige were over time. Specifically, these student groups were formed for an assignment, which counted towards their end of year grades.

In total, 263 students were randomly assigned to a mixed-sex group, and were followed over 16 weeks.

The researchers got these students to rate each other on their leadership styles, and what they thought their peers’ positions were in the social pecking order. They also completed surveys about themselves throughout the semester.

Nice guys finish first

So what did they find?

Replicating previous studies, the researchers found that both dominance and prestige were a successful way for students to acquire status in these newly formed groups.

The authors write:

These results align with previous work that suggests that humans have a disposition to defer to those that they perceive as able and willing to confer benefits or harm, even among groups of undergraduate students, whereby fear and threat may not be particularly potent. 

Critically however, dominance lost its sticking power in the weeks after the groups were formed. Conversely, prestige strongly increased students’ social status over the period of the semester.

With this experiment, the researchers were able to rule out an alternative explanation for dominance’s effectiveness: that dominant individuals are simply mistaken for being prestigious. Rather, the experiment clearly showed that individuals in unacquainted groups can gain status either through aggression and coercion, or by building respect through their skill and competence. These are distinct leadership strategies, which also had different trajectories.

Another insight gleamed from the study is that prestige and social status are a two-way street. That is, being a student high in prestige increased one’s rank in the social pecking order. However, promotions in social rank also bumped up one’s prestige a couple of notches. This was not the case for dominance, where ratings of dominance remained largely unchanged for those who gained higher social status.

Finally, the researchers found that although prestige and dominance have a negative relationship with each other, they are not entirely separate either. In other words, a leader can be both dominant and prestigious at the same time.

The prestige premium

As is always the case, there are limitations to this study.

Like the majority of psychological studies, these experiments were conducted with American university students. However, we know that these people are really WEIRD. That is, they represent a slice of humanity who are Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic, who do not necessarily reflect humanity overall. Further experiments would need to be conducted cross-culturally to confirm whether or not these findings are universal.

The authors argue that as the students had a vested interest in making sure their groups performed well, these project teams paralleled work in the outside world of business and government. However I’m not so sure. For various reasons, I suspect students generally are not that invested in the outcomes of group assignments.

As Daniel and his colleagues note themselves, there may be contexts where dominant leaders are able to sustain their advantage over an extended period of time (for example, when working in large and fragmented organisations). Likewise, dominant leaders may deploy tactics to maintain their social rank, such as ostracising their competitors or modifying group structures, to prevent challenges to their power base.

These points aside, this study sheds light on aspects of leadership which had previously been left in the dark. What the study answered is not whether dominance is a successful leadership strategy, but when it is. 

Contrary to what is taught in many business schools and psychology departments, dominance is an effective way of gaining status. Indeed, it is likely those who rise to the top of corporate and political hierarchies have a combination of dominance and prestige in their repertoire, and deploy both strategies when needed (think of Jeff Bezos for example, and imagine what it must be like working in his executive team… Did you experience a pang of fear?).

However, a domineering leadership style also comes with a hefty price tag; less satisfied employees, reduced creativity, and people rushing for the next exit. On top of this, we now have evidence suggesting that leaders high in dominance are less successful in the long-run. To put it bluntly, being a leader who’s an arsehole is unsustainable.

Or to frame it in the positive, we modern humans place a premium on prestige. Whether it’s your organisation’s leadership capabilities or your own development, make sure you invest your capital wisely.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business

Scientific Publication

The Appeal of the Primal Leader: Human Evolution and Donald Trump

Almost 63 million Americans voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump’s victory defied experts’ predictions, and shocked the world.

How could a man widely dismissed as a joke, a conspiracy theorist and an impulsive narcissist with no political experience whatsoever, capture the world’s most powerful political position?

Not only did Trump perform dismally in the presidential debates and routinely spread blatant falsehoods throughout his campaign. He also branded Mexican immigrants as rapists, where footage of him boasting about sexually assaulting women subsequently emerged. Trump mocked war heroes and the disabled, dismissed climate change as a hoax created by the Chinese, and launched personal attacks on members of his own political party.

Many explanations have been presented since the election of President Trump. For example, many point out that Hilary Clinton in fact won the popular vote, and that procedural issues were a contributing factor. The FBI investigation into Clinton’s email usage is also listed as one of the main reasons. Others either highlight the inadequacies of Hilary Clinton’s campaign, or emphasise the sexism Clinton faced as a presidential candidate.

There is some validity to all these points, and they were likely contributing factors. However, these are proximate explanations for why Donald Trump won the election, rather than the ultimate explanation. After all, these factors can’t explain why Trump received the Republican nomination, and managed to secure millions of votes.

A new paper written by psychologist Dan P. McAdams sheds light on the matter.

Inside the Mind of Trump

Dan P. McAdams is a world leading figure on personality, who has helped reconcile various different strands of personality psychology. His three layered model of personality featured prominently in Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis. 

Prior to the 2016 U.S. Election, McAdams wrote an in-depth article for the Atlantic Magazine titled The Mind of Donald Trump. In this piece, McAdams produced an impartial investigation of Donald Trump’s extraordinary personality, and outlined how his personality may shape his possible presidency. (I recall sharing this article on Facebook when it was still deemed unthinkable for Donald Trump to win the election).

McAdams is back, with a publication in the new journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture.

Primal Dominance

As opposed to investigating Donald Trump’s personality, McAdams’ new essay provides an overview of leadership and followship psychology through the lens of evolution. Essentially, McAdams argues that Trump’s appeal to millions of voters was his uncanny ability to channel what is termed ‘primal dominance’. “Like the alpha male of a chimpanzee colony, Trump leads (and inspires) through intimidation, bluster, and threat, and through the establishment of short-term, opportunistic relationships with other high-status agents.”

In this light, Trump’s aggressive leadership style is nothing new. Rather, Trump channels the psychology of dominance that traces back millions of years in human evolution, to our primate heritage. The human and chimpanzee lineages split off from their common ancestor approximately 5 to 7 million years ago. According to McAdams, both primate species took with them a proclivity for social hierarchy, and the corresponding psychology of dominance.

To highlight the similarities between the species, McAdams cites the work of primatologist Frans de Waal, who illustrated the aggressive strategies chimpanzees use to secure leadership positions. As stated by McAdams; “The top chimp achieves his standing through aggression, intimidation, and threat. Prerequisites for the top post often include being large and being strong, though smaller dominant chimps can compensate through powerful vocal displays and other intimidating tactics.”

Frans de Waal wrote a book called Chimpanzee Politics back in 1982, which offered the first overview of the lives and social strategies of primates, and provided a mirror reflection of human nature. Apparently politicians such as Newt Gringrich flocked to the book upon its release. However, in many ways Chimpanzee Politics appears more relevant today. As stated by McAdams:

When the first edition of Chimpanzee Politics appeared in 1982, readers were struck by how much chimps turn out to be like humans. But the case of Donald Trump shows how much humans turn out to be like chimps.

However, the story of leadership strategies is a bit more complicated when it comes to us homo-sapiens. We humans are a cultural species, and rely heavily on cultural know-how for our survival and reproduction. We humans have crossed what has been called the ‘Rubicon of cumulative cultural evolution’ by evolutionary biologist Joe Henrich—kicking off an evolutionary process of innovation and knowledge transfer which has shaped our biology, and is now the driving force of human evolution itself.

The Psychology of Prestige

With the emergence of cultural evolution, a new way of attaining status emerged—a form of leadership referred to as prestige. This form of leadership does not rely on brute force and intimidation, but rather on the socially valued skills and expertise. As a cultural species, we grant high status to those who advance cultural learning within our communities—covering domains such a hunting, healthcare, cooking, caregiving, and the arts of defence.

At first glance, one could consider Trump as a prestigious leader. Not only is Trump a prominent businessman, Trump was originally considered a thought leader in business. McAdams highlights that Trump was made famous for his 1987 book The Art of the Deal, which burst in onto the world stage as an expert. If one new nothing else about the Donald, they may assume that Trump used the psychology of prestige to attain his position. However, McAdams states that a casual reading of The Art of the Deal reveals why this is evidently not the case.

But, of course, nothing could be further from the truth, as even Trump’s most ardent admirers would acknowledge. Even a casual reading of The Art of the Deal reveals that the cultural knowledge Donald Trump aims to transmit is not so much a specialized portfolio formulated to address a specific problem in culture but rather a more general set of strategies aimed at achieving social dominance—dominance in virtually any context in which “deals” are to be made, from real estate to politics to interpersonal relationships.

Which brings us to one of the main arguments presented by McAdams. Prestige psychology is a junior rival to primal dominance, and does not necessarily hold an advantage as a leadership strategy. Rather, dominance is in many ways a more successful  leadership strategy than prestige, but comes at great cost to the collective. What is novel is the remarkable extent to which Trump has used dominance as a leadership strategy to secure the presidency. As stated by McAdams:

If President Obama tried to steer the ship of state slightly toward prestige psychology, Donald Trump has swerved violently in the opposite direction, creating a political and psychological whiplash. No U.S. president in recent memory, and perhaps none ever, has tapped so effectively into the primal psychology of dominance.

What is largely omitted from McAdams’ essay is the environmental factors which may have facilitated the rise of Trump. For example, recent research from London Business School suggests a preference for dominant leaders increases during times of uncertainty (primarily economic insecurity, and threats of terrorism and war).

In this respect, one can speculate that the uncertainty caused by a chaotic presidency may actually increase desire for an authoritarian leader, rather than attenuate it. Perhaps this would be another type of ‘political and psychological whiplash’.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business

To download the full paper, click here.

References

McAdams, D.P (2017) The Appeal of the Primal Leader: Human Evolution and Donald J. Trump, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 1(2). Available here.

Henrich, J. (2016) The Secret of Our Success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton University Press

Kakkar, H., & Sivanathan, N. (2017). When the appeal of a dominant leader is greater than a prestige leader. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201617711.

Tracy, J. (2016) Take Pride: Why the deadliest of sins holds the secret to success. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Image credit: DonkeyHotey