Going back to the Reagan presidency, US voters have supported various celebrities for elected positions.

While celebrities may have what it takes to succeed in elected office, they may not as well.

Based on an evolutionary perspective, it is noteworthy that celebrity was not a thing for most of our history.

The tendency to think that celebrities' public images can replace actual expertise is highly concerning.

Here are some celebrities who have emerged as elected leaders in the United States:

Ronald Reagan, actor—Governor of California and President of the United States

Jesse the Body Ventura, professional wrestler—Governor of Minnesota

Arnold Schwarzenegger, body builder and actor—Governor of California

Al Franken, actor/comedian—US Senator representing Minnesota

Donald Trump, reality TV star/business person—President of the United States Aside from the quizzical fact that Minnesota and California—wildly different states from each other—seem particularly prone toward electing officials who have backgrounds in the field of entertainment (now there's a research question for you!), the fact that several officials in some of the highest offices in the nation have backgrounds in the entertainment industry should give anyone pause. Running a Government Is Not Something That Just Anyone Can Do While government and political science are not my field of expertise, like many of us, I took a course or two on government and history back in the day. I remember an AP US History course with Mr. Raby in about 1987. This course was no joke. The details of the three branches of government, the nuts and bolts of the US Constitution, the historical reasons for things like the electoral college, historical relations between the US and other nations around the world, etc., were not exactly common knowledge—not by a long shot. There is a reason that people who work in specialized fields have educational and work-related backgrounds in those fields. I don't want my airplane pilot to have the experience of having played a pilot in the movies. I don't want the person building my house to be someone who played a contractor on a TV show. And I don't want my surgeon to be someone who got the job simply by having played a surgeon on TV. To think that educational background and expertise are not relevant for taking on a position as an elected official is simply naive. So why do so many of us seem to think that actors with no background in government are suitable for some of the highest elected positions in the nation? Why Do We Think That Celebrities Match the Characters That They Play? Two critical psychological concepts that shed light on this issue include evolutionary mismatch (see Geher & Wedberg, 2022) and dispositionist bias (see Ross & Nisbett, 1991). Evolutionary mismatch, broadly, refers to situations in which an organism's current environment is mismatched from the ancestral environments that surrounded that organism's evolutionary history. For most of human evolution, actors on TV shows were not a thing. So our minds evolved to make inferences about people's characteristics based on behaviors that they displayed—and doing so was usually a good bet as to what that person was like in an overall sense. This same process, inferring people's traits based on their behaviors, doesn't work that well when we are talking about celebrities from the entertainment industry. For instance, Jesse the Body Ventura played a wild, beast of a man in his wrestling persona—truly a character. A character that only somewhat reflected who he was when not in-character. The same is true, in varying degrees, with all celebrities who portray a specific character when........

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