Guys who are taller and have bigger muscles are perceived to have better leadership skills and higher status than guys who look physically weak, according to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley and Oklahoma State University.
When study participants looked at photos of men wearing white tank tops, they "overwhelmingly" equated the guys with bigger arm, chest and shoulder muscles as being better leaders.
But there was one major limitation: If those dudes were perceived as throwing their muscles around in a way that came off as bullying, all bets were off.
In other words? Have muscles, but be a gentleman about it.
Past studies have evaluated the relationship between size and status, but the study's co-author Cameron Anderson, a professor of management at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, told HuffPost his group wanted to specifically explore why we equate physical strength with leadership.
"What we found was that strong men attained higher status because they were perceived as providing leadership to the group -- and not because they bullied and intimidated others into submission," he told HuffPost.
We trust big men to lead us
Anderson and Aaron Lukaszewski, an assistant professor of psychology at Oklahoma State University, showed study volunteers photos of men who had previously volunteered to do strength tests and have their photos taken.
To avoid influence from a well-known finding in which men who are perceived as more attractive are seen as better leaders, they even showed some of the study participants photoshopped images of the men in which they'd swapped the heads and faces of weaker guys onto the bodies of the stronger men.
In addition to swapping faces, the researchers also photoshopped the images to vary height. They found that taller guys were viewed as better leaders only because they were perceived as having more strength -- not because of anything inherent to height.
The result was always the same: Bigger muscles and a larger frame on a nice-seeming man won out.
But behavior still matters more
In addition to leadership ability, they also asked the subjects to rate a more elusive quality: Did they think each man pictured would use his strength for his own selfish goals or for the good of the group?
When subjects saw a man as "using his brawn for himself (and himself only)," Anderson told HuffPost, "they didn't grant him higher status."
Results showed that bullies -- even if they had a strong physique -- were viewed as weak.
Why? We may view strong men as good leaders, the researchers suggested, because they can enforce prosocial rules like cooperation.
The researchers also conducted the same experiment using photos of strong and weak women, but found no significant effect on perception of leadership skills.
Their study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
