After last week’s U.S. presidential debate, while many viewers fixated on the strange tangents like false claims about immigrants eating dogs and cats (understandably), I’ve been preoccupied by a word both candidates repeated over and over about their opponent.
“Weak.”
When I work with corporate leaders as a consultant and speaker, I prefer to keep as far away from politics as I can. But there is something counterintuitive that the business world can learn from the way democracies select their leaders—in particular regarding the subconscious human obsession with perceived strength vs weakness.
That’s why this month, my co-author Joe Lazer (who wrote the book The Storytelling Edge with me) and I partnered with a neuroscience technology firm called Neuro-Insight to study what’s really going on in voters’ brains as they gauge presidential candidates. We issued a high-tech version of the Harvard Implicit Association Test (which measures subconscious bias by gauging millisecond response times) to 1,000+ swing voters. We first surveyed these voters on their current candidate preference (Donald Trump or Kamala Harris), and then aimed to learn how they subconsciously associated each candidate along the following:
- “My Vote” – indicating what they subconsciously planned to vote for (which often differed than what they’d written in the survey)
- “Radical” – indicating that they subconsciously think of the candidate as extreme
- “Strong” – indicating that they subconsciously think of the candidate as strong
- “Weak” – indicating that they subconsciously think of the candidate as weak
- “Good for America” – indicating what they subconsciously think the candidate’s impact on the country would be
- “Gets Me” – indicating that they subconsciously think the candidate understands and empathizes with them
What we learned from this study was fascinating on the political science front (you can read the whole methodology here and our analysis here). But one key takeaway stands out as a lesson for any leader outside of politics as well.
Our Obsession With “Strong” Leaders
For decades, psychologists and business researchers have studied the role of perceived strength in how humans judge whether or not to follow a given leader. In a nutshell, people are more likely to vote for, support, or cooperate with a leader who they perceive as “strong.” Studies dating back to the 1980s (along with many more recent ones) suggest that people who display traits like confidence and dominance, or who have strong physical features, tend to get the votes and promotions over those who don’t. A 2007 study published in Evolution and Human Behavior found that people who appear physically stronger, even in just their face, tend to be rated more highly as leaders. A 2004 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that taller people are more likely to be promoted into leadership at work.
Politicians haven’t needed any of these psychology studies to know this. They’ve been painting themselves as strong and their opponents as weak since forever.
And if you know very little about someone who’s put forward as your potential leader, the answer to the question “Do they seem strong?” might be the only thing you have to go on.
That said, studies repeatedly show that there’s something far more important for leaders to prove if they want people to follow them. If you have more than an instant to make an impression, a more powerful attribute to convey than strength is trustworthiness.
“Trust” Is Stronger Than “Strength”
Research has shown over the years that there are a few traits that people associate most with leadership. Top of the list are: competence (our trust in the person’s abilities), integrity (our belief in that person’s congruence), confidence (the person’s display of strength and decisiveness), and empathy.
When you connect these dots, what you find in that list is essentially what Dr. David Schoorman found in groundbreaking work on the psychology of trust in 1995. (Which I recently wrote about on Forbes.com here). Turns out that trust is built on consistent demonstration of three things together:
- Competence/Ability
- Integrity/Congruence
- Benevolence
Without all three, we won’t fully trust other humans. Trust in someone’s ability or integrity is moot without trust that they will treat us well.
I call this The Terminator Paradox.
In the first Terminator movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up to the present day as a lethal assassin robot from the future. He is capable of anything; you’d surely trust in his abilities to get a job done. And he always does what he says he’ll do.
But you wouldn’t trust the Terminator if he wasn’t on your team.
In fact, the stronger he is, the worse he is, if he doesn’t have benevolence for you.
Perceived “Strength” Can Backfire If It’s Not Paired With Benevolence
When we looked at the subconscious associations from the brains of our swing voter test subjects, we found that by and large, people were more likely to associate “My Vote” with “Gets Me” than with “Strong.” Regardless of which candidate voters said—out loud—that they would vote for, the candidate that they subconsciously associated their vote with tended to be the candidate that they thought would empathize with them. Terms like “Radical” and “Weak” (common attacks from each candidate on the other) didn’t matter as much in people’s minds as “Gets Me” did.
Which makes sense, knowing the research on the psychology of trust.
Human nature leads us to try to assert our superiority, toot our horn, or show off our skills when we’re trying to prove that we will be a good leader. And that may work for a first impression. But what actually proves to people in the long run that we’re worth following is a belief that we will treat those people well—especially if our interests one day diverge. One of the most unfortunate things about politics is how cynical we’ve become about whether candidates are saying what they actually believe or what they think we want them to say.
Turns out, what we actually want them to say is “I get you, and I want to do right by you.”
Shane Snow is an author, CEO, and keynote speaker on the science of storytelling, leadership, and innovation.