A new social experiment discovered that conflict within a group makes people more likely to support dominant leaders. Highly dominant individuals, who tend to punish others, are endorsed as leaders when the group faces significant conflict, but not when conflict is low. The study was published in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology.
Throughout history, tough times have seen strong dominant leaders rise to power. For instance, in the ancient Roman Republic, emergency situations allowed the appointment of temporary dictators. Wars, occupations, and other threats to nations have often led to dominant leaders taking charge. While some of these leaders used coercion and force to gain compliance, many were genuinely supported by the people.
Scientists have been puzzled by why people tolerate “strongmen” leaders despite their intimidating and coercive tendencies. Early researchers suggested that those who favor dominant leaders might possess certain characteristics, such as viewing the world as full of conflict and threat, conservative and right-wing political beliefs, a preference for hierarchy and competition between groups, and dispositional aggressiveness. However, recent studies have shown that the preference for dominant leaders can vary depending on the context.
Study author Joey T. Cheng and his colleagues hypothesized that when a group is under threat or in a conflict, dominance acts as a very powerful source of prestige. In such situations, group members would be likely to support dominant leaders. On the other hand, if the group is not under threat the support for dominant leaders would diminish. These researchers organized a study in which they particularly focused on the effects of a threat of conflict and disorder within a group on the support for dominant leaders and prestige stemming from their dominance.
To conduct the study, researchers established a mobile testing site at the ground of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Eight research assistants would approach potential participants at the university grounds and, if they accepted to participate, would take them to the mobile testing site. In this way, the 1,026 participants who completed all elements of the study were recruited between May and December 2017.
In their experiment, the researchers combined three different levels of punishment applied with 10 different levels of threat faced by the group (in the experiment) to create 30 different experimental conditions. Each participant was randomly allocated to one condition.
In each of the conditions, participants observed three players play a game. In the game, the first player had a chance to take some tokens for himself from the second player (threat). The second player could not do anything about it. There was also a third player who was presented as the group leader. He had an opportunity to punish the first player for taking the tokens from the second player (punishment). The third player would do that by sacrificing some of his own tokens to have the first player lose five times as many.
The experimental conditions differed in how many tokens the first player decided to take from the second player (the threat level, with 10 different numbers of tokens taken, ranging from 6 to 60) and how high the punishment the third player enacts on the first is (three levels: low – no tokens taken, moderate – 30 tokens taken, and severe – 60 tokens taken).
After observing the game, participants were asked to report on how much they would endorse the third player as a leader (7 test items adopted from a leader endorsements scale) and how much prestige they perceive the third player to have (a 4-item scale developed by the authors). Researchers also obtained a measure of perceived dominance of the third player.
The results showed that participants perceived the third player as more dominant in situations when he delivered harsher punishments (i.e., decided to take more tokens from the first player). As the punishments increased, so did the average rating of the punisher’s perceived dominance. This pattern held across all 10 threat level groups. In these conditions, the third player was also seen as having the highest prestige.
Looking at the level of support the third player received as a leader, the results showed that the leader obtained the strongest support from participants to be a leader when the threat faced by the group was the highest (i.e., when the first player took the highest numbers of tokens). In contrast to this, the weakest leader support occurred when the degree of group threat was low (i.e., when player one did not take many tokens from the second player) and the perceived dominance of the third player was the highest (i.e. when player three decided to punish the first player harshly).
“Our results show that the degree to which dominant individuals are preferred as leaders depends on the extent of threat and conflict faced by the group. The strongest leader support is obtained at high levels of both threat faced by the group and candidate [the third player] perceived dominance,” the researchers concluded.
“Conversely, the weakest leader support is obtained at low threat and high candidate [the third player] dominance, as well as at high threat and low candidate dominance. These patterns hint at how, overall, those more exposed to threat and conflict are more likely to endorse a highly dominant individual as leader; conversely, when threat and conflict are minimal, a less dominant individual is preferred.”
The study sheds light on an important aspect of psychological dynamics of groups. However, it also has limitations that need to be taken into account. Notably, although the threat conditions passed the experimental manipulation check, the threat and the whole situation were essentially artificial and minimal. Additionally, study participants were students. Results on other social and age groups and in more naturalistic conditions might not yield identical results.
The paper, “When Toughness Begets Respect: Dominant Individuals Gain Prestige and Leadership By Facilitating Intragroup Conflict Resolution”, was authored by Joey T. Cheng, Nathan A. Dhaliwal, and Miranda A. Too.
