Cynics rarely rise to the top

Do you think that most people are well-meaning and want to help others? Or does the idea that when they seem to be doing something nice, it's always out of self-interest, seem more true?

The latter is a cynical outlook, and there is plenty of research linking it to all kinds of undesirable outcomes for the individual, including poorer social relationships and marital difficulties as well as problems with mental and physical health. Now, new work in the British Journal of Psychology investigates the potential impact of cynicism on two specific aspects of our interactions with other people — the desire for power, and the achievement of power.

Olga Stavrova at the University of Lübeck, Germany, and colleagues first ran a study on 688 Dutch students. These participants completed a measure of cynicism, rating the extent to which they agreed with statements including 'Most people make friends because friends are likely to be useful to them'. They also completed a measure of power motives (rating how much they wanted to be an executive with power over others, for example), as well as scales that assessed how important power was to them, their level of fear of being exploited by other people and, finally, their willingness to exploit others.

The team's analysis of this data suggested that more cynical people are more hungry for power, and that this hunger for power was driven more by a fear of being exploited by others than by a desire to exploit other people.

In a second, online study of 397 working adults, the team once again found that cynicism was more strongly linked to a fear of exploitation than a desire to exploit. In this study, however, they did not find a link between levels of cynicism and a desire for power. What they did find was that more cynical people scored higher than the others on a measure of a desire for social dominance; they were more likely to agree with statements like 'I enjoy bending others to my will'.

The researchers then turned again to studying Dutch students, who, in groups of six, spent about half an hour on a few tasks, including a creativity task. Afterwards, they were asked to identify the person who had emerged as the group 'leader'. These participants also completed various scales, including a cynicism measure. Once the data was analysed, it became apparent that cynical individuals got fewer leadership nominations than less cynical students. In fact, the least cynical quarter of the sample received three times as many leader nominations than the most cynical quarter. This link held even when the team controlled for a number of variables that might have influenced the result, including levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and self-control.

Stavrova and her colleagues then turned to 10 years' worth of data from a study on a nationally representative group of around 9,000 German employees. They found that employees who'd scored higher on a cynicism measure at the start of the study period were less likely to gain a leadership position at work over the following decade. Specifically, those who'd scored one standard deviation above average for cynicism at the start had a 1% lower chance of going on to get a job that involved supervising others. This effect size is evidently small. But the team points out that it's comparable to the effects of some other well-established predictors of leadership, including being female and being an immigrant.

It has to be noted that the findings from the various studies weren't completely consistent, especially on the question of whether more cynical people might want more power. And it may be that negative experiences at work could help to drive cynicism, rather than the other way around. It's possible that people who are passed over for a promotion may become more cynical, and also less likely to look for, or to get, a leadership promotion in the future.

Clearly, more work is needed to explore the possible links between cynicism, power, and leadership. But this research does suggest that more cynical people are more concerned about being exploited, and so may seek to dominate others as a defence mechanism against this. Unfortunately for them, however, though social dominance is one well-established route to authority, cynical people appear to be less, not more, likely to be perceived as leaders by others. 

Read the paper in full:

Stavrova, O., Ehlebracht, D., & Ren, D. (2023). Cynical people desire power but rarely acquire it: Exploring the role of cynicism in leadership attainment. British Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12685