Tyrrell: Choose our leaders the right way
South facade of the White House, Washington DC. The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the President of the United States.
October 24, 2018
Let me start off with a question: hypothetically, if you had to have a complicated and high-risk disc replacement surgery in your spine, how would you pick your surgeon?
Most likely you would spend weeks researching surgeons with the best credentials, recommendations and experience. You would choose someone with a good education who is respected by others in their field, and you probably wouldn’t choose your surgeon based on how much you liked them or how charismatic they are.
So why is that exactly how we choose the people to lead our country?
There are piles of studies about how oftentimes, people vote for the more attractive candidate. How charismatic a candidate is can have an outsized effect on our perceptions of them as a leader, despite evidence that sometimes a lot of charisma can be a drawback in leadership. I can personally attest to the fact that many people didn’t vote for Clinton in the 2016 election because they just “didn’t like her,” and I’m sure I’m not the only one who heard that.
Why are we choosing the people to run our country—which happens to be a global superpower that affects markets and countries all over the world—based on how much we like them? Their job is not to be likable, their job is to be knowledgeable with the experience and resources to run our country. The last presidential election we chose a man whom only 38% of people thought was “qualified to serve as president.”
The psychology of why this happens is pretty easy to understand. People want to trust their leaders, and its easier to trust someone when you like them, but in what other career field—medical, business, law—would anyone choose a leader whom they don’t believe is qualified to lead?
The people in office are doing some of the most important work in the world. Theirs is not a job in which personality points should matter. Instead, experience and past history should take precedence when deciding who is fit to lead us.
One of the most important elections in United States history is coming up. This is our chance to choose qualified candidates over likable ones. For lack of a better phrase, don’t mess it up.
