To one group of people, the personality of the leader is of crucial importance, to others his ancestral roots. At one time, the religious affiliation, and at another, the right education or vision of the future. Whatever determines the outcome, it must be strongly correlated with what the group perceives to be its needs and upon its definition of an acceptable life. This is the information content of the signal. Selecting a leader is no trivial pursuit.
People take it very seriously.
They harbour the belief that the results of this decision will also determine whether their needs will be fulfilled. Information is gathered from open sources, formal and informal, by deduction, induction and inference, through contextual surmises, historical puzzle-work and indirect associations. These are the cognitive, epistemological and hermeneutic dimensions of the information gathered. It is all subject to a process very similar to scientific theorizing. Hypotheses are constructed to fit the known facts.