An Experimental Examination of Demand-Side Preferences for Female and Male National Leaders.

Gregg R Murray,Bruce A Carroll

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.576278

Gregg R Murray, Bruce A Carroll

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.576278

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Abstract

Females constitute a far smaller proportion of political leaders than their proportion in the general population. Leading demand- and supply side explanations for this phenomenon account for some of the variance but leave a great deal unexplained. In an effort to account for additional variance, this research evaluates the issue informed by the biological theory of evolution by natural selection, a foundational explanation for the diversity and function of living organisms. It experimentally assesses how varying types of inter- and intragroup threat–a recurring ancestral problem–affect demand for female and male national leaders. This work analyzes data collected from individuals (N = 826) in the U.S. during the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. The results suggest the predominant preference for male over female leaders in some contexts may be the non-adaptive and non-functional but lingering outcome of an adaptive preference for physically formidable allies that was shaped by natural selection in ancestral environments.

Highlights

In the last several decades, women have attained unprecedented success in the electoral arena (Geiger and Kent, 2017)
The instrument directed subjects to describe in their own words the leader they imagined and to answer a series of open- and closed-ended questions related to leader preferences stemming from the treatments followed by a series of political and demographic questions
Learning or environment-related explanations such as gender stereotyping (e.g., Huddy and Terkildsen, 1993; Kahn, 1996; Sanbonmatsu, 2002; Bauer, 2015) successfully account for some of the variance in this behavior, but, like most social science models, they leave a substantial amount of variance to explain

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the last several decades, women have attained unprecedented success in the electoral arena (Geiger and Kent, 2017). The research presented here suggests explanations informed by Darwin’s (1859) evolutionary theory of natural selection may shed additional light on the relationship between gender and leadership preferences This argument suggests the imbalance in female-male leadership attainment may be the nonadaptive and non-functional but lingering outcome, or incidental by-product, of an adapted psychological mechanism that favors a preference for physically formidable leaders in certain situations. This argument is in line with evidence that war stimulates a preference for leaders with greater weight and body mass (Murray, 2014) This is consistent with emerging research on adaptive followership theory, which suggests that modern followership preferences are influenced via factors related to natural selection by the outcomes of leadership in ancestral situations of social conflict (Little et al, 2007; Van Vugt et al, 2008b; Spisak et al, 2012; Van Vugt and Grabo, 2015; Laustsen and Petersen, 2017). One thousand subjects participated in the survey experiment with completed responses obtained from

RESULTS

DISCUSSION

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