The Warren Harding Error and Implicit Association

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink contains a section describing what he calls the "Warren Harding Error". Warren Harding was a politician in the early 1900's who was known for his good looks, impressive appearance, and lack of actual ability. One might argue that political ability is somewhat immeasurable, or ask who has the right to say he was successful only for his appearance and did no lasting good. The fact is, if you don't already know who Warren Harding is, you are already disproving that idea.

Warren Harding: The 29th President of the

United States of America

Surprised? I'd wager you might never have even heard his name before. If you knew who he was, kudos, you know more about America then most Americans do. This point, the fact that a man who was generally described through physical details and has been called the worst president in America, stuck out in my mind. How could it be that he made it to the pinnacle of politics without a closer look at his actual abilities? Do such seemingly insignificant qualities such as appearance really have as big an unconscious grip on human judgement as this makes it seem?

This is where Gladwell mentions the IAT, or the Implicit Association Test. This test (available for free to all at implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/ ) measures, as it describes, unconscious biases toward or against certain things. The test works by giving you words to sort into two groups, each group mixing things like race and positive or negative descriptions. The test measures your reactions and amount of time to sort things into the appropriate column within milliseconds and analyzes the data to produce a result of your unconscious preferences. I took two of these myself; the test comparing races to positive or negative adjectives and the test comparing weapons or harmless objects to races. For the first, I expected none or almost no preference seeing as I have many good friends and mentors of several different races. Surprisingly, however, I was given the result of having a strong preference towards European-American people. I can understand why, seeing as I still have spent the majority of my time with those of European descent, however I was nearly sure that wouldn't affect me. The opposite happened on the second test. I expected a slight association between African-Americans and weapons based on the results of my first test and the blatant bombardment of media association between those groups. Yet again, surprise struck me; My result was no bias towards either of the races.

My IAT results prove that, unfortunately, character isn't determined based on actual character, but instead on physical appearance (not to say closer examination wouldn't provide an accurate result). This begs us to question how to evaluate potential leaders if apparently we've been doing it all wrong. While I have no answer to how, I do have suggestions for what to look for. Addressing the point of physical attractiveness, I believe the only time a leader's physical appearance or capability should be a factor in quality of leadership is if any physical condition would prevent them from performing aspects of the position. If we are successful at disregarding the outside, the only things left are the classic leadership traits such as intelligence, bravery, responsibility, charisma, and ability to make decisions. That will be the test of society: Will we be able to overcome these implicit associations to recognize a good or bad leader when we see one, or will we continue to create these undeserving biases?