Completely Different Strategies for Winning the Presidency

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Imagine this: There is a presidential race going on. The two major parties have determined their candidates.

Party A puts forward Candidate X, described as follows:

Candidate X is running for president of the U.S.A. He has held several elected positions prior at the county and state levels. He has a reputation for really getting what he wants. He seems to focus very much on himself during campaign season. He is not afraid to put the feelings of others aside to get what he wants. He knows that his vision is best for everyone.

Party B puts forward Candidate Y, described as follows:

Candidate Y is running for president of the U.S.A. He has held several elected positions prior at the county and state levels. He has a reputation as truly believing in the good side of his constituents. And he seems to truly care about people from all walks of life. He prioritizes the needs of each individual constituent over his own political success. He truly hopes that his vision is best for everyone.

Now, based on only the above information, think about which candidate you would prefer for the next president of the United States.

This is exactly what participants in a recent study from my lab (the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab) were asked to do (Lombard et al., 2025). Further, in this study, the 300 participants (adults drawn from various sources around the nation) were asked to fill out measures of:

Political Orientation (Everett, 2013): We used a validated measure of social and economic conservatism versus liberalism.

Dark Triad Personality Traits (Jonason & Webster, 2010): We used a measure including items that tap:

• Narcissism (overly inflating one's value)
• Psychopathy (tending not to care about others' feelings)
• Machiavellianism (manipulating others for one's own gain)

Light Triad Personality Traits (Kaufman et al., 2019): We used a measure including items that tap:

• Faith in Humanity (the idea that people are generally good)
• Humanism (the belief that all people should have a seat at the proverbial table)
• Kantianism (the belief that others should be seen and respected as their own individuals and not be used as pawns in one's own game)

Strategic Pluralism and Approaches to Leadership

This study is largely rooted in the evolution-based concept of strategic pluralism (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), which suggests that organisms (humans included) often have evolved multiple strategies for solving adaptive problems. And it is often the case that two strategies that vary wildly from one another on the surface may lead to the same evolutionarily relevant goals.

In terms of winning an election for a leadership position, we can employ the concept of strategic pluralism quite neatly. If you think about presidents of the United States, for example, you might be able to conjure up a president or two who legitimately has had others' thoughts and interests in mind; a leader who is genuinely other-oriented (such as Candidate Y, above). But you also may be able to think of a president or two who might have held a more self-serving approach to both running a campaign and to actual leadership.

Each of these strategies has the capacity to lead to the same ultimate outcome. A candidate who is genuinely other-oriented and who develops a reputation as such may be attractive as a leader and might be elected into office as a result. On the other hand, a candidate who is expert at manipulating others and advancing their own agenda may end up being elected into office as well. Each of these candidates might make it into elected leadership positions—for extremely different reasons. This is what strategic pluralism is all about.

Lessons Learned From Our Research on Preferences for Other-Oriented vs. Self-Oriented Leaders

In our study, we were curious as to the qualities of people who tend to gravitate toward the other-oriented leader as opposed to the self-oriented leader. Here are highlights from our results:

• Generally, there was a tendency across participants to prefer the other-oriented candidate (Candidate Y) over the self-oriented candidate (Candidate X).
• People who scored high on our measure of the Dark Triad tended to show a significant liking of the self-oriented candidate (Candidate X).
• People who scored high on the measure of the Light Triad tended to show a significantly lowered preference for the self-oriented candidate (Candidate X).
• People who scored high on the measure of the Light Triad showed a significant preference for the other-oriented candidate (Candidate Y).
• People who scored relatively high on the measure of political conservatism tended to score high on Dark Triad Traits (Machiavellianism and psychopathy in particular).

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Bottom Line

Based on the idea of strategic pluralism (see Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), organisms (humans included) have evolved a broad array of strategies to solve various adaptive problems across our evolutionary history. Emerging as a leader in a group corresponds to power, status, and access to resources—all of which bear on the all-important evolutionarily relevant outcomes of survival and reproduction.

Based on this basic framework, our study (Lombard et al., 2025) sought to determine why some leaders seem to be elected in powerful positions due to displaying an other-oriented approach to social life while others seem to be elected in the same powerful positions due to displaying a self-oriented approach to social life. Perhaps the personality traits that comprise the dark and light triads ultimately reflect different evolved strategies for approaching the social world.

In short, the results of the study show that personality characteristics are interestingly and importantly related to preferences for self- versus other-oriented leaders. People who gravitate toward self-oriented leaders tend to score high on Dark Triad traits, while people who gravitate toward other-oriented leaders tend to score high on the Light Triad. And political conservatives tend to score higher on measures of the Dark Triad than do people who score low on political conservatism.

In a world that is characterized by large-scale social and political misunderstanding, perhaps these results can shed light on why leaders who emerge via a democratic process often vary wildly from one another in terms of their approaches to winning elections and to the all-important work of leading and supporting the citizens who got these leaders into their (often powerful) elected positions.

Understanding the various strategies related to winning elections within a democracy matters as much now as ever. Hopefully, the study described here sheds useful light on the process.