Malcolm Gladwell Blog Response

In Malcolm Gladwell’s chapter of The Warring Harding Error it surprised me that so many people based good leadership on exterior aesthetics. It surprises me even more that people encouraged Warren Harding to run for president even though he stated that he was not interested in it. “He was, most historians agree, one of the worst presidents in American history,” (Gladwell). Harding had the physical attributes of a good leader but as it turns out his intelligence of leadership lacked because most agree he was a terrible president. The message that I see in this chapter is the classic ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’.

This chapter is very useful in a discussion of leadership because you can point out what you would not like in a leader. Harding was physically strong and good-looking, which is naturally good traits of a leader, but there is also a second part of the leader equation that also needs to be filled. The second half is intelligence of a leader. The leader needs to be considerate and make the best decisions for the public. When only looking at half of the leader traits and making a decision we are creating unconscious biases. Fixing these biases is very easy because all you need to do is identify it and work towards adjusting the behavior towards it.

I took the IAT for the association between weapons and faces and also the preference over different raced children. My results did surprise me a bit because I thought, like most people, that I was not biased towards a subject. My results for the weapon IAT said that I had a “strong automatic association between weapons and African American faces compared to European American faces”. This surprised me because I rarely ever think of weapons and “Moderate automatic preference for European American children compared to African American children”. I always try to think of equality towards all races but it turns out that I have a preference European Americans. I think my unconscious biases are based on the fact that America advertises that European Americans are the most friendly race.