Abstract
Objective
Why do dominant leaders rise to power via the popular vote? This research tests whether when people feel threatened by intra-group disorder they desire stronger, more dominant leaders.
Methods
Participants (N = 1,026) read a vignette that depicts a within-group norm violation. We then used a between-subjects design to randomly assign participants to a specific version of the vignette in which (a) a focal target individual in the scenario varied in their dominance (punitiveness: from no to moderate to strong); and (b) the local group faced little or substantial intra-group conflict and disorder (threat: from low to high). Following this, participants reported how much they endorse the target individuals as leader and the individual’s perceived prestige.
Results
We find that intra-group conflict motivates a psychology that favors the rise of dominant leaders: Highly punitive individuals (seen as highly dominant) are endorsed as leaders when in-group threat is high, but comparably disfavored when threat is low. Under low threat, non-punitive individuals (who are seen as less dominant) are endorsed as leaders. Subsequent analyses reveal that these shifts in leader preferences are explained by corresponding changes in prestige. Under conditions of high threat, dominance confers prestige, whereas under low threat, dominance suppresses prestige. Tests of mediation further show that the effect of dominance on increased leader support under high threat is mediated by prestige.
Conclusions
In contexts of threat, such as internal disorder, dominant leaders are favored and gain prestige, owing to their perceived ability to supply benefits such as in mediating internal conflicts.
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Data Availability
The dataset analyzed in the current study are available in the Open Science Framework repository: https://osf.io/v8mf2/.
Notes
In our research design, we deliberately recruited in-person participants (at a university campus) rather than workers from online labor markets in the light of prior evidence linking worker non-naïveté to skewed responses (Chandler et al., 2014; Paolacci & Chandler, 2014; Rand et al., 2014). It is estimated that 10% of workers complete roughly 41% of assignments (Chandler et al., 2014). This issue is especially relevant that, as in many other standard economic games, the third-party punishment game (TPPG) we deploy here is a relatively common experimental paradigm, thus further increasing concerns with practice effects. Thus, despite their more restricted age range and other demographic characteristics, the university students we sample here reduce concerns with participant non-naïveté in our specific experimental procedure, and is preferable to online workers.
The same qualitative results are obtained across all research questions explored when we use the entire sample without eliminating participants who failed the comprehension check questions.
In this design, threat faced by local group (our independent variable) was manipulated across 10 levels, with each subsequent level corresponding to higher level of intra-group threat operationalized as greater theft or norm violation. This decision to implement this higher than usual number of levels was guided by two considerations. First, we sought to increase analytic flexibility. Many analytic approaches (including the kinds to be deployed here) are facilitated by variables with a larger number of ordered categories—6–7 categories or more—that can be treated as continuous variables with little bias (Rhemtulla et al., 2012). Second, the inclusion of these extreme levels of threat—that is, very modest threat when A stole only 6 tokens from B, or very severe threat when A stole 60 tokens from B—allows us to explore, using non-parametric methods, the possibility of non-linear effects. For example, one possibility is for punishment to exert a weak effect on leader endorsement across low to moderate or even moderately high levels of threat and conflict, but that when threat is exceptionally high the effect of punitive action suddenly double or triples in strength.
Two features of this variation of the third-party punishment game are noteworthy. First, similar to other work on norm violations (Cubitt et al., 2011; Ouss & Peysakhovich, 2015; Rilke, 2017), we deploy the ‘take’ framing in which Player A ‘took’ tokens from Player B because this act of theft clearly harms Player B and therefore more unambiguously signals norm violation. This contrasts with the often used ‘give’ framing (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004), in which Player A ‘gave’ less than a fair share of tokens to Player B. under this framing, what constitutes a norm violation is less clear and can vary across groups and cultures. Second, Player B loses 1.67 tokens for every token gained by Player A. By design, this multiplicative effect means that theft leads to a larger loss to one party than is gained by the other (similar to many real-world thefts), making theft in this context ‘wasteful’ and ‘inefficient’. So the optimal behavior is to not steal.
Beyond these primary outcome measures, for exploratory purposes we also asked participants to indicate the degree to which they trust Player C, and feel anger as well as embarrassment over Player C’s response to Player A’s behavior. Moreover, in the non-zero punishment treatments (i.e., Player C either moderately or strongly punished conditions), we also measured inferences of Player C’s punishment motives in terms of deterrence and retribution.
In the mediation model, C’s perceived dominance, which served us our manipulation check, was not included in the model as a second mediator (alongside C’s perceived prestige, the primary mediator). At first glance, it would appear sensible to include ratings of dominance to examine how C’s punitive action contributes to both kinds of status. However, this variable is strongly correlated with punishment condition (r > .55), which is unsurprising given that participant ratings of C’s dominance is, in theory, simply a direct function of the punishment condition to which they allocated (plus some interindividual noise or error). Excluding dominance ratings thus avoids collinearity concerns and produces a more conceptually meaningful model.
As in much other work seeking to identify mediating pathways, caution is warranted in interpreting the mediation results here. More rigorous experimental studies designed for establishing causality, such as studies in which prestige (our putative mediator) is manipulated randomly rather than merely observed and any unobserved confounders are carefully eliminated (Bullock et al., 2010; Green et al., 2010; MacKinnon et al., 2002), are needed to firmly establish the mediating pathways by which punishment increases leader appeal. Moreover, while our results indicate that punishers garner prestige, we lack evidence on what specific skills, attributes, competencies, or know-how are deemed particularly prestige-worthy among these willing punishers. Addressing this using measures of perceived skills and attributes, which were not gathered in the present study, is an important direction for future work.
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Cheng, J.T., Dhaliwal, N.A. & Too, M.A. When Toughness Begets Respect: Dominant Individuals Gain Prestige and Leadership By Facilitating Intragroup Conflict Resolution. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology 8, 383–406 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-022-00196-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-022-00196-6