Most people set out in life wanting to believe the world is fair. They expect people to wait their turn in queues, to be treated equally in their job, and to be rewarded for hard work. These expectations influence how they understand the world around them, and shape their responses to it.

But what happens when life repeatedly challenges those assumptions? Psychologists have long been interested in this question. Our new research, published in the British Journal of Psychology, suggests adverse experiences shape both how fair people believe the world is, and how they view their place in society.

Over the course of a lifetime, personal setbacks – from illness and bereavement to being a victim of crime – may have a cumulative effect, leading to a growing sense that the world is unfair. We think this is important in the context of today’s increasingly polarised societies, in which trust in institutions has declined severely in the UK and many other countries.

Adversity and unfairness

Our research set out to answer two key questions: do experiences of adversity influence whether people see the world as fundamentally unfair – and if so, what are the societal consequences? We conducted three surveys involving more than 1,200 British participants with an equal gender split and average age of 39.

In one study, we found that people who reported experiencing more lifetime adversity – including illness, bereavement, financial hardship and violence – were more likely to believe the world was unfair.

In another, we compared people who had experienced violent victimisation with those who had not. After accounting for demographic factors, people who had experienced violent crime reported stronger perceptions of injustice.

Our final study found that greater lifetime adversity was associated with lower trust in institutions through perceptions of injustice. This is important because trust underpins many aspects of society, from confidence in public institutions to democratic participation.

Together, these findings suggest that people don’t simply interpret information based on the facts available to them. They also interpret it through the lens of their previous experiences.

Two people can read the same news story, watch the same political debate or hear the same public health advice, yet come away with very different conclusions that may not simply reflect differences in knowledge or politics. It may also reflect differences in how they have come to see the world as a result of the hardships they have faced.

Furthermore, if someone increasingly believes that the world is unfair, they may be more likely to notice fresh examples of perceived injustice, corruption or hidden motives – and interpret new events through that lens.

Belief in conspiracy theories

Previous research has shown that people who feel uncertain, powerless or threatened are often more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. Most of this work, however, has focused on their identities, traits and beliefs.

In our investigation of the impact of adverse life experiences on people, we found a remarkably consistent pattern. When these hardships are associated with stronger perceptions of injustice in the world, the same people more strongly endorse conspiracy beliefs.

Conspiracy theories rarely describe events as random. Instead, they tend to suggest that powerful individuals or organisations are secretly responsible for what happens. They offer explanations that identify intentional causes behind events that might otherwise seem confusing or unjust.

Research suggests that across societies, the level of belief in conspiracy theories is relatively stable over time. But once these beliefs become part of how someone understands the world, they can be difficult to shift.

This makes it all the more important to understand the experiences and psychological processes that may contribute to these worldviews developing in the first place. Our findings suggest that perceptions of injustice are one such pathway.

For someone who increasingly feels the world is unfair, conspiracy theories may become more psychologically appealing – providing a way of making sense of experiences that otherwise feel difficult to understand.

Our research does not suggest that adversity inevitably leads to conspiracy beliefs; nor that conspiracy theories are an inevitable consequence of trauma. Rather, it highlights a long-term psychological process that may help explain why some people become more receptive to these ideas.

In an increasingly polarised world, the media and political focus is often concentrated on what information people consume. But our research suggests we should pay more attention to the experiences that shape the lens through which people interpret information. This could help explain why people can look at the same events and reach very different conclusions.

Ultimately, people’s experiences don’t just affect them in the moment. They shape their worldview – which can influence how they interpret and respond to events and other people’s behaviour far into the future.

So, we believe any effort to reach greater consensus in society may require a deeper understanding of the hardships people have lived through over the course of their lives – and how these can affect their sense of injustice.

Daniel Jolley has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The studies mentioned in this piece were funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Scheme (SRG23/230720) and carried out in collaboration between Daniel Jolley, Laura Blackie, and research assistant Anna Maughan.

Laura Blackie has received funding from the British Academy.

Whatever your politics or profession, leaders who dominate our collective memory are rarely the quiet, methodical ones. They are the ones who stepped on stage or screen and made people believe in a vision, a company, a movement or a future. They all had charisma.

Think of leaders who have captivated the public imagination: Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Jobs, Margaret Thatcher. Not universally liked, but they all had something.

In contrast, the UK’s “deeply unpopular” prime minister, Keir Starmer, has suffered for his widely perceived lack of charisma.

So what, exactly, is this seemingly magical quality? And why of all the characteristics we might prize in a leader – competence, integrity, careful judgment, ethical courage – do we so consistently fall for it?

The word “charisma” comes from the Greek khárisma, meaning a divine gift or grace. The German sociologist Max Weber first applied it systematically to leadership in the early 20th century. He described charismatic authority as a form of influence rooted not in any formal rules, but in a leader’s extraordinary personal qualities.

Today, psychologists recognise charisma as a cluster of characteristics and behaviour that signal authenticity, emotional competence, persuasiveness, passion and enthusiasm – and which together mobilise followers towards a shared goal or activity.

Success influences perceptions of charisma, of course. Perhaps more worryingly, how someone looks is also important, and we form those judgments in an instant.

Ratings of charisma based on five-second silent video clips were found to correctly predict how some people judge leaders over much longer periods, using richer observations. In other words, we often decide very quickly whether someone “looks like a charismatic leader”.

Charisma is teachable

However, not everyone agrees that charisma is so superficial. Others, like the British sociologist Max Atkinson, believe it is primarily a social skill that can be taught. Perhaps, even to those who don’t have the requisite looks.

Indeed, few experts have done more to strip the mystique from charisma than Atkinson. His work focused largely on the content and delivery of political speeches – another key determinant of how people view a leader’s charisma.

In his 1984 book Our Masters’ Voices, Atkinson used systematic analyses of political speeches to demonstrate that what audiences experience as charisma in oratory is, to a considerable degree, the product of identifiable rhetorical techniques that reliably trigger applause and emotional engagement.

Atkinson identified a small number of structures that generate spontaneous applause in political speeches. These include two-part contrasts (“not this, but that”), three-part lists (“government of the people, by the people, for the people”), and the packaging of praise or attack in ways that signal to the audience when to respond in an immediate, unified way.

Such techniques have an immediate impact on judgments of charisma. They are not, however, accidents of natural talent. They are rhetorical devices at least as old as Cicero, and as teachable as any other communication skill.

Atkinson put this to a striking test in a 1984 Granada TV programme. He coached a speaker with no prior public speaking experience to deliver a conference address to the Social Democratic Party’s annual conference.

The coached speaker won multiple rounds of applause and a standing ovation. BBC commentator Sir Robin Day called it “the most refreshing speech we’ve heard so far”. The audience had no idea they were responding to a method.

This anticipated what researchers such as John Antonakis would later confirm: charismatic leadership involves specific, teachable behaviour. He identified both verbal features (including use of metaphor, storytelling, and rhetorical questions) and nonverbal ones (animated voice, open gestures, facial expressiveness).

Speeches that used more of these features received significantly higher ratings for trust, competence and leadership potential from independent raters. This work points to the same uncomfortable conclusion: much of what we experience as a leader’s natural magnetism is, in fact, a performance based on specific features that can be deliberately scripted.

Evolved strategy

Why, then, are we so susceptible to these signals? One answer comes from evolutionary psychology. Charismatic leadership is thought to be an evolved strategy for group coordination.

Our brains evolved in small-group environments where following an inspiring, confident individual in times of threat may have helped us survive because we acted together.

This may help explain why we are more susceptible to charismatic leaders in times of crisis. When things feel uncertain or dangerous, people might reach for the visionary. Yet the very leaders we feel most drawn to in those moments – the boldly confident, the certain, the inspiring – may not always be well-suited to navigating such complexity, if they resist the open-minded, ambiguity-tolerant thinking that difficult problems require.

There is another important consideration. The qualities that make someone appear charismatic overlap with some less flattering personality profiles. Studies have revealed positive correlations between charisma in leaders and narcissism.

While narcissism may help leaders rise to positions of power, it does not predict effectiveness once in those roles. Indeed, an inverted U-shaped relationship between charismatic personality and leader effectiveness has been found.

Charisma is clearly not without value. The ability to communicate a compelling vision, build trust and mobilise people towards a common goal is very important, as is the resultant hope.

But the modern obsession with charisma as a primary criterion for leadership can be distorting. We can end up giving too much weight to charisma in selection decisions, and too little to qualities like integrity, intellectual humility, and the willingness to say “I don’t know”.

The task of a sophisticated follower, whether in a boardroom, a ballot box or a town hall meeting, is surely to slow down, look past the performance, and ask harder questions. Remember, first impressions are not always right, but they are incredibly sticky.

Geoff Beattie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.