Do we form ‘first impressions’ of people within an initial split-second and usually stick to them thereafter? How is this with regard to leaders? Is it true that the outcome of a vote can often be predicted from gut reactions to ID pictures of the candidates? Is it true that our political preferences can also be influenced by chance tastes and smells, or even hormone spikes? What is charisma? Could genes and corporal characteristics play a significant role? That seems hard to believe. But just read on.
This is a book about a peculiar pattern of first impressions that some people make, and that may mark them as potential leaders to themselves and to others. The book will delve into seven very practical and concrete factors that have recently turned out to play a significant role.
But let me first briefly spell out just a few general principles of first impressions, of leadership and charisma and of gut feelings about others’ competence, as well as of dominance hierarchies.
First Impressions and Instant Appeal
Think back to when you first met your current partner. Chances are you felt immediate sympathy or even attraction. This is one reason why speed-dating sessions work, particularly for people who are always busy with work and meet too few people outside their own very small circle. Or why Internet dating sites have become so popular. We just sample a very ‘thin slice’ of potential partners through a mere picture, the mention of a hobby, or a profession.
But can we entirely put the finger on which elements were decisive? That is often hard to do. Yet we make snap judgments: we immediately see a whole configuration that pleases us, rather than a mere sum of separate aspects. Modern research has found we partly do this with rather primitive parts of our emotional brain, bypassing the more evolved parts of our ‘rational’ brain. These first impressions then colour our further impressions through so-called ‘confirmation bias’, our interaction with and treatment of that person, and further steer our feelings either in a positive or negative direction.
One of the early pioneers of this specific field was a Harvard psychologist. He first discovered the so-called ‘experimenter effect’, which biased his own laboratory results. If experimenters knew beforehand which animals or people were supposed to perform better than others, they unwittingly treated them slightly better and thus helped the expected result to come about. Making it belong to a broad class of phenomena that a sociologist had earlier labelled ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’. This distorted their lab results, and made them untrustworthy. Therefore, modern testing of new treatments is done ‘double blind’: assistants should not know which subjects get the real treatment or a placebo replacement instead.
The same psychological pioneer then discovered the so-called ‘Pygmalion effect’. If teachers held preconceived ideas about which children (e.g. white, upper-class, good-looking, self-assured etc.) would perform better in class, they would unwittingly come to privilege them. The effect is named after the classical story of a sculptor who fell in love with his own statue, which was adapted in the famous musical My Fair Lady. Since then, a wide range of variations of these effects has been identified, in a wide range of domains.1
Another psychologist at the University of Toledo in Ohio similarly did a further series of research projects about the surprising power of first impressions. In one of them, he trained almost sixty interviewers to evaluate job applicants. They held twenty-minute interviews and then completed a four-page evaluation form about them. The entire sessions were videotaped. A female undergrad then showed the first fifteen to thirty seconds (!) of each encounter to untrained observers. These turned out to be able to predict the ultimate rating by the job interviewers with uncanny precision.2 So today, the general recommendation to job applicants is this: make a great first impression; you will never get a second chance.
The aforementioned psychological pioneer at Harvard and a female assistant then wanted to evaluate what made some college teachers more effective than others. They taped hours and hours of lectures, and had the teachers rated by students. But in the end they decided to use just the very first few images, taken at the very beginning of the term.
They had observers rate apparent characteristics of those presenters with adjectives like ‘active, confident, optimistic, likeable’. It turned out they could fairly well predict the teacher’s evaluations at the end of the term—three full months later—even when they further reduced the clip from thirty to just two (!) seconds, and even went so far as to cut the sound. What was going on there?3
These earlier findings fit in with later fundamental discoveries. Psychology has increasingly identified two radically different ways by which we process information and appraise situations. On the one hand there is an intuitive, emotional and approximate way we use for everyday choices. And on the other hand an there is an argumentative, rational and more thorough way we supposedly reserve for the really important decisions. This view has been theorised by Daniel Kahneman, the only true psychologist ever to earn a Nobel Prize (albeit in economics)his 2011 overview of his life’s work: Thinking Fast and Slow.
Over the last decade, the whole new field of intuition, snap judgments, and ways to influence them through so-called ‘priming’ and ‘nudges’ began to receive a lot of media and public attention. The ‘Implicit Association Test’ (available on the website of Harvard) does for instance reveal that we are all unconsciously biased and prejudiced about age, gender and race to a certain extent. Police shootings of people of African or Arab descent illustrate this time and again. It turns out that very marginal hints may trigger our reactions by activating different sets of thoughts and feelings.4
Leadership and Charisma Studies
These recent findings on first impressions have profound implications for management and politics. Over the last generation or so, a new, separate inter-discipline of leadership studies has emerged. It has practical relevance for the recruitment, training and coaching of potential leaders, but also embraces more fundamental theoretical research—exchanged through regular meetings of experts, their international societies, and scientific journals.
The American Leadership Quarterly has already celebrated its first quarter-century, with a special overview issue. It is mostly focused on the empirical and quantitative investigation of ‘hard’ facts and the exploration of statistical correlations between them, leading to the building of detailed models. The European journal Leadership is about a decade old and has slightly different accents, also allowing for more ‘qualitative’ studies. The British journal Leadership and the Humanities is only a few years old, and tries to extend the field to examples from history and literature.
Within such publications, trends have gradually shifted, and helped to broaden our view. One recent trend is to link the study of leaders more closely to the study of followers and their subjective experiences of the link. As the former seem to have plenty or even too much of certain characteristics (i.e. a sense of direction and confidence), the latter may have too little of the same (i.e. a lack of orientation and feelings of insecurity). One interesting variation on this theme is formed by recurring surveys of how citizens feel about presidents or prime ministers, or even how ordinary subjects feel about their monarchs.5
In everyday life, however, the same people can very well be leaders in one domain (e.g. the economy or politics) but followers in another domain (e.g. fashion). The contrast between leaders and followers is not always absolute, furthermore, but rather relative—as on a scale of one to ten. But it is true that in many individual encounters and situations, one person has a degree of psychological ascendance over the other.
In encounters between an individual and a larger group, the former may even have a degree of psychological ascendancy over the latter as a whole. This means that this single person may disproportionately help shape the thoughts, feelings and actions of the many, their desires and their goals. This is not always obvious; it often remains implicit or even completely unnoticed.
This book is primarily focused on top leaders of large semi-permanent groups in a general sense: leaders of movements, organisations and nations. But the degrees to which they prevail do once again differ. One classic modern overview on the subject distinguished between the everyday ‘transactional’ leadership of ordinary managers and administrators and the long-term ‘transformational’ leadership of grand visionaries.6 Another term that has frequently been used in this latter context is ‘charisma’.
That is a classical Greek word for a ‘divine gift’ or grace. It was originally used in church history to denote religious foremen and prophets, who seemed to be endowed with supernatural qualities. A German pioneer then introduced the term into the new field of sociology, to distinguish that mysterious type of exceptional leadership from mere traditional or modern bureaucratic leadership. But the phenomenon has regained significance in the context of the present multimedia age, the further personalisation of politics and the renewed rise of political populism.
Both social science and popular opinion have long held that charisma was an individual trait or combination of traits, and were always obsessing over whether one leader had ‘it’, the X-factor, or not. But charisma is rather a peculiar quality ascribed to the whole relationship between leaders and followers, by those same leaders and followers. One recent assessment of the whole research tradition in management studies was therefore extremely critical about such mysterious qualities.7 My sociologist colleague Dick Pels did in turn conclude: ‘So charismatic authority is to a high degree illusory. It is the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy: a definition that helps call into existence the very reality that it defines’.
It is ‘the result of a double reification’, he clarified. On the one hand ‘the charismatic [leader] often experiences his own force as an external calling, and places it outside himself’. On the other hand ‘people involuntarily project their own force onto others, thereby empower them, and subject themselves to that embodied force as to a fetish’.8 Furthermore it is often also a hindsight notion, for instance in biographies and history books, invoked when other factors fail to explain apparent exceptional influence and leadership.
Today, many managers and administrators aspire to ‘develop’ such a magical trait. When I searched Amazon for the latest literature on the subject, it offered me more than a hundred pages with more than a thousand titles. Many of those are popular ‘how to’ books about optimising your aura and skills through a few easy tricks. Yet many of those books have no deep roots in scientific research, and only a few seem really helpful.9
They are mostly about knowing your own ‘strengths and weaknesses’, which create ‘opportunities and threats’, and about some kind of ‘applied impression management’ for optimising your chances. So let us get back to the subject of first impressions, but this time more specifically focused on leaders and candidates.
‘Curb Appeal’ and Apparent Leader Competence
It was by mere coincidence that Secretary General of the French Socialist Party François Hollande became president. Previously, other candidates from his own camp had always bested him.10 The incumbent Gaullist President Nicolas Sarkozy would once have been a strong opponent, but he had gradually discredited himself through his hyperactivity and numerous scandals. For better contrast, his image consultants thus positioned Hollande as ‘Mister Normal’.11
But after his election, this soon turned against him, as he looked drab and weak and proved unable to stem the tide of France’s deficits and the unemployment numbers that continued to rise. Media and audiences concluded that he did not seem to have ‘it’, the X-factor, and his popularity ratings soon dived to the...