Why We’re Drawn to Leaders Who Emphasize the Negative
There’s a tendency to assume that we want our leaders to be encouraging, magnanimous, and optimistic. But in the last decade, across borders and sectors, we’ve been seeing an increasing number of leaders better known for a style that is more vitriolic, punitive, and negative. This disconnect led me to wonder how positive or negative rhetoric affects our perception of someone’s leadership. My subsequent research shows that although we may think we want our leaders to be cheerleaders, we instinctively tend to empower naysayers instead. As prior research has shown, we humans create social hierarchies to preserve order and form rich expectations of how the powerful will behave. We have evolved to be sensitive to the behavioral cues that signal these power dynamics. For instance, we often associate a person’s physical height with power, which leads us to attribute more power and status to tall people. These kinds of associations may be particularly influential when we’re just gettin