Liberals give dominant leaders lower odds of success than conservatives do, study finds

Political liberals have long been known for their skepticism when it comes to forceful, domineering leaders. A new study published in Political Psychology reveals that this skepticism may stem from a psychological tendency that transcends party affiliations. In various experiments, liberals consistently rated domineering leaders as less fair, less caring, and less likely to succeed compared to conservatives.

This pattern suggests that liberals might be more complacent when casting their votes. Leadership in organizations and governments typically employs two primary strategies: prestige or dominance. Prestige-oriented leaders gain respect through expertise, cooperation, and fairness, while dominance-oriented leaders achieve status through assertiveness, intimidation, and coercive authority.

Despite the general dislike for dominance, the threat of force can still be as effective as earned respect in gaining influence over a group's decisions. Historical evidence shows that dominant leaders often gain popularity during times of economic instability, when individuals feel a lack of personal control and seek strong, authoritarian leadership.

Additionally, personal worldviews play a significant role in how people react to aggressive authority. Research indicates that individuals who view the social world as a competitive arena tend to perceive harsh, antagonistic leaders as competent and effective, whereas those with a cooperative worldview find the same behavior ineffective.

These worldview differences often align with political leanings. A 2019 survey experiment found that right-wing voters were more inclined to support dominant political candidates than left-wing voters, largely because conservatives viewed forceful candidates as more capable of managing conflict. Psychologists attribute these ideological divisions to moral foundations theory, which posits that people base moral judgments on distinct sets of core values.

Liberals prioritize individual-welfare values like fairness and protecting others from harm, while conservatives emphasize group-binding values such as loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. Understanding how liberals forecast the trajectories of dominant leaders has been a challenge. To investigate this, Danbee Chon, an assistant professor at the University of South Florida's Muma College of Business, collaborated with Hemant Kakkar, Dean's Chair and associate professor at the National University of Singapore's NUS Business School.

They observed that liberal commentators and citizens frequently predicted failure for dominant politicians, such as Donald Trump, as well as business executives like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. "The study was motivated by a real-world phenomenon where we observed that political liberals tend to underestimate leaders who come across as dominant, assertive, or at times authoritarian," Chon and Kakkar explained to PsyPost.

The 2016 U.S. election and the 2024 election, as well as the Remain campaign in the UK, exemplify recurring instances where liberals underestimated the appeal and effectiveness of dominance. These consistent miscalculations led the researchers to explore whether a deeper psychological pattern underlies this phenomenon. Chon and Kakkar hypothesized that when a leader employs coercion and authority, liberals perceive a violation of their core values of fairness and harm avoidance.

This moral dislike, influenced by the affect heuristic, could cause liberals to underestimate a dominant leader's chances of success. To test this hypothesis beyond partisan politics, the researchers examined how people evaluate their actual bosses in the workplace in Study 1. A survey was conducted with 177 full-time employees in the United States, aged 47 on average and with nearly 23 years of work experience.

Participants rated their immediate supervisor's dominance and prestige behaviors on a 1-to-7 scale and reported their political views on a 7-point Likert scale, ranging from very liberal to very conservative. One week later, employees assessed how much their boss valued fairness and avoiding harm, how warm and likable their boss was, and the likelihood of their boss winning a workplace promotion against three other candidates.

The study also considered employee demographics, job tenure, and the supervisor's prestige score. The findings revealed a clear ideological divide when supervisors exhibited dominant behaviors. As the dominance score increased, liberal employees rated their boss as less committed to fairness and harm avoidance, less likable, and less likely to be promoted compared to conservative employees.

When supervisors scored low on the dominance scale, there was no significant difference in ratings between liberal and conservative employees.