Leadership, Followership, and Beliefs About the World: Theory and Experiment∗

Behavioral literature in political science and psychology suggests that factual beliefs about the world often vary across different social groups, including by partisan affiliation. This paper explores potential microfoundations for this regularity by analyzing interactions between a group leader and her “followers.” A game-theoretic framework is developed, in which a leader with private information about the state of the world sends a message about it to her followers. In the model, the leader is best off when followers successfully coordinate their actions. Because followers have preferences over coordination outcomes that are aligned in some states of the world, but not in others, leaders sometimes have incentives to misrepresent the state of the world in order to make coordination more likely. Two novel refinements, “Leadership-Correlated Equilibrium” and “Belief-Based Followership Equilibrium,” explicate distinct mechanisms through which a leader’s messages about the world could potentially coordinate the actions of fully-rational followers. The intuitions behind these refinements are then tested in a laboratory experiment. Results from the experimental games suggest that leaders do frequently misrepresent the state of the world to followers when it is in their interests to do so; that leaders’ strategically-chosen messages about the state of the world are highly effective in coordinating group members’ actions; and that leaders’ messages strongly influence followers’ beliefs about the state of the world even when Bayesian followers would not find the messages to be credible as statements of fact. Followers appear not fully to account for leaders’ strategic incentives to misrepresent the state of the world in forming their posterior beliefs, even though the experimental elicitation mechanism offers substantial monetary rewards for accuracy. This finding suggests behavioral foundations for the empirical regularity that members of different social groups may have different factual beliefs about the world.