President Obama and Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, are both constantly in the news. One holds the top leadership position in the nation, the other aspires to it. They represent the two increasingly polarized political parties. Both are relatively young, newcomers on the political scene. The question is this: How do we evaluate the leadership (and leadership potential) of our nation's political leaders? The short answer is "poorly."
I want to discuss two psychological processes that govern the way we evaluate leaders, and cause us to make very general (and perhaps inaccurate) evaluations of our leaders. "Heuristics" refers to the mental shortcuts that we are prone to take. Research has shown that people tend to be "cognitive misers" - using limited, shortcut thinking instead of critical analysis. In short, we tend to be lazy when it comes to thinking. As a result, rather than analyzing whether our leader is doing a good job by considering how the leader has performed at the various (and often complex) components of the job [in the President's case, there are a number of key areas - the economy, the wars, foreign relations, the list goes on and on], we make quick and shallow judgments.
Those who are negative on Obama say, "Where's the promised change?" and not seeing any sort of transformation consider him a failure. Some Obama supporters use the shortcut formula, "He's better than Bush." Sadly, the media falls victim to shortcut thinking itself and presents shallow analyses, or, worse yet, uses public opinion polls (ironically, which are the collective result of people using shortcut thinking) to determine the President's performance. [A good example is the analysis of recent drop in Obama's poll numbers that suggest that most of it is driven by people's concern for the U.S. economy - again a simple, "shortcut" analysis.]
The same mental shortcuts apply to evaluations of Sarah Palin. "She's a maverick," "a patriot," or a "true conservative." There is little consideration of her qualifications, experience, or other criteria that would make her a good President. In fairness, Barack Obama was not exceptionally qualified for the Presidency, and his experience pales in comparison to his Vice President, Joe Biden. (I argued years ago that if experience and qualifications mattered most, Al Gore would have been President in 2000).
The second psychological process that affects our ability to objectively and thoroughly judge a leader's performance is our own feeling, positive or negative, about the leader. Strong emotions can sometimes cloud our judgment and impair our ability to critically analyze the leader's performance. There are many cases where ineffective leaders remain in power simply because they are loved and supported by the majority, who let their positive feelings for the leader overlook poor performance.
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