Fear of the unknown

Recently, a US town made the news for a terrorist incident when a man armed with an automatic rifle started firing rounds in a public place. The gunman was eventually brought down by local police authorities but not before he had killed four people and injured seven others. On further investigation, it was found that this person belonged to the sleeper cell of a terrorist organisation. The police haven’t ruled out the possibility that there could be further sleeper cells and say a further attack may be likely. Residents are urged to remain vigilant and report any suspicious activity.

Imagine you lived in that town. How would you feel knowing that another attack might (or might not) take place at any time? Does it make you more than a little uneasy? Hang onto that feeling, because it holds the clue to a whole area of human behaviour that social psychologists have spent decades trying to figure out.

As it happens, this particular terrorist incident is fictitious. It was dreamt up by London Business School’s Niro Sivanathan and Hemant Kakkar as part of an experiment into the leaders people tend to choose when they lack a sense of control over their lives. The researchers’ starting point was two well-established routes to leadership: dominance and prestige. This was around the time of the US election, providing real-life examples of two archetypes.

Donald Trump obviously personifies dominance, while Hillary Clinton’s appeal is founded on prestige: her status was based on her expertise, knowledge and experience. And you don’t have to look far to find other alpha leaders besides Trump. “From the UK’s Brexit vote to the resurgence of nationalism in communist China and the ascent of Narendra Modi in India, we are witnessing a return of populist, authoritarian leaders whose rhetoric focuses on nationalism and protectionism,” says Kakkar.

“Dominant leaders - despite the multitude of negative attributes associated with them - are often revered. People believe these individuals can help restore control. Whether or not it materialises is another question. It’s all about the promise.”

The appeal of dominant leaders

Kakkar and Sivanathan’s research breaks new ground in two ways: firstly, their studies used objective macroeconomic indicators of economic uncertainty for a large, representative global sample comprising 140,596 participants from 69 countries. Second, they draw on the evolutionary origins of leadership. In combination, they say, this provides a theoretically grounded and empirically robust explanation for why dominant leaders are preferred over their prestigious counterparts.

“The prestige path to attaining an influential position in the group hierarchy is unique to humans,” says Sivanathan. “In the animal kingdom, the alpha male gains status through dominance, command and fear. In humans, on the surface of it, the dominance route doesn’t seem as appealing: what kind of person gets power and influence through control and brute force?”

But it seems we may not have evolved as far as we’d like to think. Because what Kakkar and Sivanathan’s studies show is that an alpha male is exactly the sort of person we want to be in charge when times are uncertain. Their research, conducted just before the start of the third US presidential debate, linked economic data at the zip-code level to a preference for strong leaders.