Social Transmission of Leadership Preference: Knowledge of Group Membership and Partisan Media Reporting Moderates Perceptions of Leadership Ability From Facial Cues to Competence and Dominance.

Christopher D Watkins,David I Perrett,Dengke Xiao

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02996

Christopher D Watkins, David I Perrett + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02996

Copy DOI

Abstract

While first impressions of dominance and competence can influence leadership preference, social transmission of leadership preference has received little attention. The capacity to transmit, store and compute information has increased greatly over recent history, and the new media environment may encourage partisanship (i.e., “echo chambers”), misinformation and rumor spreading to support political and social causes and be conducive both to emotive writing and emotional contagion, which may shape voting behavior. In our pre-registered experiment, we examined whether implicit associations between facial cues to dominance and competence (intelligence) and leadership ability are strengthened by partisan media and knowledge that leaders support or oppose us on a socio-political issue of personal importance. Social information, in general, reduced well-established implicit associations between facial cues and leadership ability. However, as predicted, social knowledge of group membership reduced preferences for facial cues to high dominance and intelligence in out-group leaders. In the opposite-direction to our original prediction, this “in-group bias” was greater under less partisan versus partisan media, with partisan writing eliciting greater state anxiety across the sample. Partisanship also altered the salience of women’s facial appearance (i.e., cues to high dominance and intelligence) in out-group versus in-group leaders. Independent of the media environment, men and women displayed an in-group bias toward facial cues of dominance in same-sex leaders. Our findings reveal effects of minimal social information (facial appearance, group membership, media reporting) on leadership judgments, which may have implications for patterns of voting or socio-political behavior at the local or national level.

Highlights

While the research reviewed above suggests that facial cues to dominance or competence can guide leadership choice, no work to our knowledge has examined the influence of social information in shaping these leadership judgments
Experimental priming condition interacted with sex of participant [F(1,193) = 5.03; p = 0.026, np2 = 0.03], which reflected women’s increased preference for facial cues to leadership ability when the media are partisan (Change: M Partisan = 0.13, SEM = 0.11, M Lesspartisan = −0.63, SEM = 0.13, absolute t(98) = 4.52; p < 0.001, r = 0.42), with no corresponding bias among men (Change: M Partisan = 0.02, SEM = 0.11, M Lesspartisan = −0.18, SEM = 0.15, absolute t(87.93) = 1.11; p = 0.27)
As participants were not aware that our rated image set varied on two trait dimensions, social knowledge of group membership and media information, regardless of partisanship, had a general effect in reducing implicit associations between perceived leadership ability and facial cues to dominance and intelligence

Summary

Introduction

Social perceptions of faces influence a variety of important social outcomes (e.g., Fiske et al, 2007; Little et al, 2011; Vernon et al, 2014; Todorov et al, 2015) and are made rapidly (e.g., Todorov et al, 2005; Willis and Todorov, 2006; Engell et al, 2007; Carre et al, 2009; Olivola and Todorov, 2010), even, on some dimensions, when irrelevant to the task at hand (Ritchie et al, 2017). Complementing work on the role of social and physical dominance in leadership emergence and effectiveness (e.g., Rule and Ambady, 2008; Wong et al, 2011; Blaker et al, 2013; Hamstra, 2014; Pillemer et al, 2014; Rule and Tskhay, 2014;, see Watkins, 2018 for a recent review), first impressions of dominance and competence can guide leadership choice based on facial cues alone (Todorov et al, 2005; Ballew and Todorov, 2007; Little et al, 2007; Antonakis and Dalgas, 2009; Re et al, 2012, 2013; Olivola et al, 2014; Re and Perrett, 2014). First impressions derived from facial cues are “offset” or strengthened by the experiences we have with those individuals

Methods

Results

Conclusion