A new body of research suggests that liberal voters consistently underestimate the appeal and potential success of dominant leaders, a bias that appears across workplace settings and political arenas. The findings, published across five main studies and four supplements, indicate liberals tend to view forceful, domineering figures as less fair and caring, to like them less, and to assign them lower odds of success than conservatives do. The authors say the pattern could influence turnout and political judgment at the ballot box.
The researchers frame leadership in terms of two broad strategies: prestige and dominance. Prestige leaders earn respect through expertise, cooperation and fairness, while dominance leaders push for status via assertiveness and control. Past work noted that people generally dislike domineering figures, yet intimidation can be as effective as earned respect for steering group decisions.
Emotion and worldview appear to shape responses to aggressive authority. Studies have linked anxiety and perceived lack of personal control during economic instability to greater support for dominant leaders, while a rival worldview that favours cooperation can dampen that appeal. The researchers also point to moral foundations theory, which posits liberals prioritise individual welfare and fairness, whereas conservatives emphasise loyalty and authority as core values.
The study’s authors, Danbee Chon and Hemant Kakkar, say liberal underestimation of dominant leaders has been observed in recent political episodes, including the 2016 US election and, more recently, the 2024 election. They also cite the UK Remain campaign’s undervaluation of Brexit leadership, noting the influence of figures such as Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson as part of the pattern. “The most striking example of this for us was the 2016 US election, where many people assumed that Trump would lose the election, and even on the eve of the election, outlets like The New York Times gave Clinton an 85% chance of winning,” they told PsyPost. “We observed similar patterns outside the US as well.”
In their work, the researchers propose a causal chain: liberal reservations about a dominant leader stem from a perceived violation of fairness and harm avoidance, which reduces likability and subsequently lowers expectations of electoral or career success. They also emphasise the affect heuristic, whereby emotional impressions colour predictions about a leader’s future performance.
The investigations began with a workplace study. In Study 1, 177 full‑time American employees rated the dominance and prestige of their boss and, a week later, assessed how much the supervisor valued fairness and harm avoidance, how warm they seemed, and how likely they were to win a promotion over three rivals. The results showed liberals perceived highly dominant bosses as less fair, less warm, and less likely to be promoted than conservatives did; when a boss scored low on dominance, the gap narrowed.
The team then ran controlled experiments to test the proposed pathway in political contexts. In Study 2A, 281 online participants read about a fictional mayoral candidate named Riley; half read a dominant, assertive portrayal, the other half a prestigious, expert-led portrayal. Liberals who read the dominant version judged Riley as less caring, less fair, and less likable than conservatives did, while views of the prestigious candidate showed no significant ideological difference.
Study 2B involved 589 participants who evaluated a social media post from a mayoral hopeful and faced a small monetary incentive: a 10‑cent bonus with the option to bet a portion on the candidate’s victory. Liberals bet less on the dominant candidate and rated them less likable and less likely to win, compared with conservatives; the prestige version again produced no meaningful ideological gap.
The researchers describe a mediational path in which lower likability partly explains liberals’ lower victory expectations and smaller bets. They caution that the experiments used fictional candidates and small stakes, so the findings measure relative biases rather than real-world outcomes.
Study 3 extended the verdicts to a nonpartisan context, with 1,042 participants evaluating the same nonpartisan city government candidacy. Even without party cues, liberals still disliked the dominant candidate more and placed lower bets on their chances, though the direct betting gap was marginal and the indirect path through reduced likability remained robust.
In Study 4, 788 participants compared two candidates side by side and then viewed exit polls showing varying odds of victory for the dominant contender. Liberals continued to rate the dominant candidate as less likable and less likely to win, while they sometimes preferred the prestigious candidate more than conservatives did. When exit polls slightly favoured the dominant candidate, liberals still wagered less, with only a substantial lead erasing the betting gap.
Across all studies, an internal meta-analysis found the liberal–conservative gap to be modest in size but consistently observed. Supplemental work, including World Values Survey data, pointed in the same direction. The authors stress the robustness of the effect across political and non-political settings and note similar patterns in contexts where leadership appearance and authority are salient.
“The most surprising finding has been the robustness of this effect,” Chon and Kakkar said. “This effect replicated in different settings, such as political or election scenarios beyond partisanship, but also among employees rating their leaders whose political affiliation should be irrelevant in such a context.”
Researchers acknowledge caveats. They say the studies cannot prove that liberals underpredict actual outcomes, only that there is a consistent bias in relative judgments. They also note that the links from moral impressions to likability and predicted success were statistical, not experimentally manipulated in a step-by-step fashion, and that turnout or voting behaviour cannot be definitively tied to these biases in the present experiments.
Conservatives’ evaluations of prestige-focused leaders varied across experiments, suggesting other factors may shape responses to collaborative styles. The authors call for further work comparing predictions with real-world outcomes and investigating whether lower expectations translate into lower turnout among opponents of dominant leaders.
Ultimately, the researchers argue the aim is to understand how ideology and values colour judgments of leadership, and how those judgments influence behaviour. They emphasise that ideology was measured with a single item and that broader analysis of economic and social dimensions could enrich future work. They conclude that the tendency to underestimate dominant leaders persists beyond party lines and warrants closer scrutiny in how people engage with politics and leadership in everyday life.
The study is titled A blind spot for dominance? Why liberals underestimate dominant leaders more than conservatives and was authored by Danbee Chon and Hemant Kakkar.
