Childhood harshness predicts long-lasting leader preferences

Abstract

Understanding the origins of political authoritarianism is of key importance for modern democracies. Recent works in evolutionary psychology suggest that human cognitive preferences may be the output of a biological response to early stressful environments. In this paper, we hypothesized that people’s leader preferences are partly driven by early signals of harshness perceived during childhood. We experimentally elicited children’s (Study 1) and adults’ (Study 2) political preferences using faces controlled for dominance and trustworthiness and showed that early childhood harshness has an enduring effect on adult political attitudes. Importantly, this impact was further confirmed using self-reported extreme authoritarianism (Study 2) and by the analysis of the large database of the European Value Survey (Study 3). We discuss the potential political implications of this early calibration of leader preferences.

No strong evidence that authoritarian attitudes are driven by a lack of control

“…and Sivanathan (1) provide new evidence of the link between economic crises and the preference for dominant leaders and strengthen previous evidence of the influence of economic crises on authoritarianism (2)(3)(4)(5). However, the authors' interpretation of why economic uncertainty favors dominant leaders entails two further predictions that are not borne out by our follow-up analyses of their dataset.…”

Is Political Conservatism Adaptive? Reinterpreting Right‐Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation as Evolved, Sociofunctional Strategies

“…Second, if RWA and SDO reflect different life history strategies and emerged in the context of coalitional conflict, then the two orientations may prefer different types of leaders and leadership activities. Other research suggests childhood harshness predicts support for dominant, undemocratic leaders (Safra et al, ). The agency and communion model of interpersonal orientation (Trapnell & Paulhus, ) provides a framework for exploring potential differences in leadership preferences between RWA and SDO orientations.…”

“…Further supporting the functional or adaptationist perspective, other evidence suggests how SDO‐like behaviors and attitudes can be triggered by environmental conditions. Individuals reporting early childhood harshness preferred more dominant, less democratic leaders (Safra et al, ). Similarly, relative to those from a resource‐rich region, pastoralists experiencing resource scarcity scored higher in a joy‐of‐destruction game.…”

Social motivation is associated with increased weight granted to cooperation-related impressions in face evaluation tasks

“…The importance of these two axes varies across social contexts [9][10][11][12]. For instance, leader preferences are more driven by dominance than by trustworthiness in war-time, when physical strength is important, but they are more affected by trustworthiness in peace-time [13][14][15].…”