The Appeal of the Primal Leader: Human Evolution and Donald J. Trump

Abstract

Drawing on the distinction between dominance and prestige as two evolutionarily grounded strategies for attaining status in human groups, this essay examines an underappreciated feature of Donald Trump's appeal to the millions of American voters who elected him president in 2016-his uncanny ability to channel primal dominance. Like the alpha male of a chimpanzee colony, Trump leads (and inspires) through intimidation, bluster, and threat, and through the establishment of short-term, opportunistic relationships with other high-status agents. Whereas domain-specific expertise confers status in the prestige paradigm, dominant leaders derogate expertise in order to establish a direct, authoritarian connection to their constituency. Trump's leadership style derives readily from his personality makeup, which entails a combustible temperament mixture of high extraversion and low agreeableness, a motivational agenda centered on extreme narcissism, and an internalized life story that tracks the exploits of an intrepid warrior who must forever fight to win in a Hobbesian world of carnage.

No guts, no glory? How risk-taking shapes dominance, prestige, and leadership endorsement.

“…Finally, the current findings shed new light on the social dynamics of real-life elections. In times of uncertainty and threat, “nasty” (Rast, 2015) or “primal” (McAdams, 2017) leaders are sometimes preferred to leaders who display a more prototypical leadership style. Competition with a rivaling outgroup may create such uncertainty and threat in the eyes of voters, potentially leading them to endorse political candidates who appear dominant, for instance because they do not shy away from taking risks.…”

When do people prefer dominant over prestigious political leaders?

“…Although originally conceived as an explanation for social rank hierarchies within small, face-to-face groups, the prestige-dominance distinction has also been applied to the political arena in large-scale societies, as described above for the 2016 US Presidential Election (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2017;McAdams, 2017;Witkower, 2017). In these applications, Donald Trump is depicted as dominant because of his more aggressive vocabulary, threats against political rivals (e.g., "lock her up", referring to his election rival Hilary Clinton), non-verbal displays of dominance such as occupying more space and extending his arms (Witkower, 2017), and the display of emotional and personality traits associated with dominance (Cheng, Tracy, & Henrich, 2010) such as high neuroticism, low agreeableness, and hubristic pride (McAdams, 2017;Nai, Martínez I Coma, & Maier, 2019). Conversely, Hillary Clinton is depicted as prestigious because of her greater political experience and expertise (e.g., having previously been Secretary of State) as well as her more frequent demonstrations of knowledge and non-verbal displays associated with the prestige strategy (e.g., smiling) during the Presidential debates (Witkower, 2017).…”

“…The dual evolutionary model of social hierarchy (Cheng & Tracy, 2014 ; Cheng et al, 2013 ; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001 ; Jiménez & Mesoudi, 2019b ; Redhead et al, 2018b ) has recently been used to understand the rise of such right-wing populist leaders (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2017 ; McAdams, 2017 ). This model distinguishes between dominance and prestige as two independent strategies that people use to acquire high social rank and influence (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001 ).…”

Thecomforter‐in‐chief: How two traumatic experiences shaped president joe Biden's first 100 days

“…Following the general approach that I developed in previous psychobiographical studies of Presidents George W. Bush (McAdams, 2011 ) and Donald J. Trump (McAdams, 2017 , 2020 ), my inquiry proceeded in a largely inductive manner. Rather than testing a hypothesis derived from theory or precedent, I began instead with the data on Joe Biden's life and presidency, looking for emerging themes to help me understand the case.…”