Whom do we trust to lead us? effects of leaders’ dominance-based leadership, prestige-based leadership and physical formidability

ABSTRACT

Drawing on evolutionary perspectives of leadership and hierarchy, we argue that hierarchical strategies and physical formidability of leaders affect followers’ trust. Specifically, prestige should increase trust, dominance should reduce trust and physical formidability should strengthen these effects. We tested these hypotheses in three experimental studies (total n = 1884), using survey and behavioral measures of trust. We found that a dominance-based leadership style consistently reduced trust in leaders whereas using a prestige-based leadership style consistently increased it. However, physical formidability didn’t moderate these effects, nor did it affect trust directly. Although more research seems needed to understand more fine-grained effects of physical formidability on different factors of trustworthiness, our results suggest that leadership styles are important predictors of how much leaders are trusted.

KEYWORDS:

• Leadership
• dominance
• prestige physical formidability
• trust

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Toine Bartholomeus for his input in developing the ideas that are central to this project and for designing and running an initial pilot study. We thank Toine and Niels Bartholomeus for modeling for the physical formidability stimuli and Dagmar Haggenburg for creating the images.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets, syntax, and codebook can be found via the following link: https://osf.io/m4ehz/?view_only=bb1d8cb99ff44e9ab07d8cb9395c9758

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2023.2256492

Notes

1. Note that due to a clerical error we included only one instead of the pre-registered two noncompliance check questions in Study 1.

2. The high number of respondents not passing these questions surprised us as the same instructions of the distrust game were used in all studies and the MTurk worker requirements were the same in Study 1 and Study 3. However, notably, these two studies were ran two years apart. Other research has found a large reduction in the quality of responses when running the exact same survey on this platform in a similar timespan, with 12.5% of respondents providing low quality responses in 2019 and 88.5% respondents providing low quality responses in 2022 (Marshall et al., 2023). They argue that this is due to more MTurk workers with lower levels of English proficiency working on the platform in recent years. A similar argument could be made with regard to our findings. Given that understanding the distrust game instructions is more complex than answering items about trust it offers a parsimonious explanation for why this issue only occurs in the distrust game and not in the other measures or instructions.

3. As an additional check on the robustness of our findings we also report the results only on the subsample who passed all check questions in the supplementary file.