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Estimated Marginal Mean Differences in Personality Attributions Between Conflict and Cooperation Conditions.a
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The present research replicates and extends previous literature on the evolutionary contingency hypothesis of leadership emergence. Using artificially masculinized versus feminized versions of the faces of the candidates for the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, we demonstrated that different contextual cues produced systematic variation in both pr...
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... When it comes to men's perceptions of women as potential military leaders, people might assume that women who appear more masculine, including those with more masculine facial features, have an advantage over their more feminine-looking counterparts (Grabo & van Vugt, 2018;Luo et al., 2023;Sczesny et al., 2006). A typical masculine female face, characterized by a broader nose, thinner lips, and stronger jawline, more closely resembles the prototypical look of a soldier than a typical feminine female face, characterized by softer facial lines, a thinner nose, and fuller lips (Grabo & van Vugt, 2018;Olivola et al., 2014). ...
... When it comes to men's perceptions of women as potential military leaders, people might assume that women who appear more masculine, including those with more masculine facial features, have an advantage over their more feminine-looking counterparts (Grabo & van Vugt, 2018;Luo et al., 2023;Sczesny et al., 2006). A typical masculine female face, characterized by a broader nose, thinner lips, and stronger jawline, more closely resembles the prototypical look of a soldier than a typical feminine female face, characterized by softer facial lines, a thinner nose, and fuller lips (Grabo & van Vugt, 2018;Olivola et al., 2014). More masculine faces are associated with traits such as strength, bravery, and dominance (Johnson et al., 2008;Walker & Wänke, 2017), all of which are valued in a military setting and associated with mission success. ...
... With respect to judging leadership potential directly from faces, men are typically rated higher than women (Chiao et al., 2008;Korenman et al., 2019). Whether in the context of job fit or leadership potential, both the sex and gender characteristics tend to influence perceptions (Grabo & van Vugt, 2018;Little et al., 2007a;Olivola & Todorov, 2010;Todorov et al., 2005). Research suggests people in a more competitive setting (such as wartime) will prefer a more masculine-looking leader versus in a more cooperative setting (such as peacetime) preferring a more feminine-looking leader (Spisak et al., 2014). ...
In this study, we examined the role of dispositional sexism in male service academy cadets' evaluations of military leadership potential for sexually dimorphic male and female faces, with a particular focus on the impact of hostile sexism. Male cadets (N = 224) rated eight pairs of masculinized and feminized faces on 14 characteristics relevant to Army leadership and completed a measure of hostile and benevolent sexism. We tested a 2 (sex of face: male, female) × 2 (gender of face: masculine, feminine) × 2 (type of sexism: hostile, benevolent) × 2 (level of sexism: low, high) mixed model ANOVA with the first two variables as within subjects and the last two variables as between subjects and using composite leadership potential ratings as the dependent variable. Results indicated a significant three-way interaction between sex of face, gender of face, and levels of hostile (but not benevolent) sexism, whereby participants with elevated levels of antipathy towards women reported the least positive perceptions of military leadership potential for women with masculine facial features. These findings underscore the importance of addressing hostile sexism in military training and leadership development programs to promote equality and inclusion.
... Previous studies have shown that feminine faces are perceived to be more trustworthy (Carpinella et al., 2016;Cassidy & Liebenow, 2021;Chen et al., 2018), and individuals weigh warmth or competence dimensions differently in different contexts (Miyoshi & Sanefuji, 2022). However, most of the researches have primarily focused on political trust generated by group conflict or cooperation situations in the field of politics (Ferguson et al., 2019;Grabo & van Vugt, 2018;Laustsen & Petersen, 2017;Little et al., 2007;Sainz et al., 2021). To the best of my knowledge, few studies have explored the influence of facial dimorphism on real-life interpersonal interaction. ...
... Furthermore, many studies only took into account male faces (Lyons et al., 2016), few research examine both facial gender and facial dimorphism simultaneously. Recently, there are some researches underscored social interaction situation including friend/mate selection and the political trust (Benson et al., 2019;Ferguson et al., 2019;Grabo & van Vugt, 2018;Laustsen & Petersen, 2017;Little et al., 2007;Sainz et al., 2021). In fact, people have to deal with a wide variety of challenging circumstances. ...
When interacting with strangers, people tend to draw inferences pertaining to the strangers’ personality traits based on their facial information, which leads to differential feelings of trust for the strangers. This study explored whether the weightage which individuals’ provide to facial warmth and competence changes with social situations when they have to make decisions based on trust. In experiment 1, a donation context was set, and the participants tended to select a stranger volunteer with feminine face as the recipient of a higher donation amount. In experiment 2, an investment context was set, and while interacting with male trustees, the participants tended to select masculine male faces as recipients of a higher investment amount. However, a contradictory result was obtained when the participants interacted with the female trustees. Participants’ perceptions of the trustworthiness of the four kinds of faces (feminine or masculine male faces, feminine or masculine female faces) predicted the corresponding donation and investment amounts. The results indicated that feminine faces (both male and female) were preferred as recipients of donation, and the warmth in the faces was given more weightage in the donation context (warmth perception). In the investment context (competence perception), participants tended to choose masculine faces as recipients of investment amount among the male faces but showed a preference for feminine faces among female faces. The research provides empirical support for a better understanding of the mechanisms behind highly flexible and complex social interactions among humans.
... In recent and in ancestral times, intergroup conflicts were frequent and entailed a substantial mortality rate (Bowles, 2009). Formidable and dominant male community leaders would have been preferred particularly in times of intergroup conflict and war (Hayden et al., 1986;Grabo and van Vugt, 2018;Garfield et al., 2019b), which could have resulted in higher reproductive success for the experienced warrior leaders (von Rueden et al., 2011;Glowacki and Wrangham, 2015;von Rueden and Jaeggi, 2016), despite the individual agency of the male leader being less crucial than social networks in betweengroup violence (Glowacki et al., 2016). Tigue et al. (2012) found that manipulated lower voice pitch of recordings of US presidents was more strongly associated with physical prowess in a wartime voting scenario and that participants preferred to vote for the candidate with the lower-pitched voice, which indicates dominance (Wolff and Puts, 2010;Aung and Puts, 2020). ...
... Similar results have been reported in other studies (Little et al., 2007;Halevy et al., 2012;Spisak et al., 2012). Facial cues associated with perceived height and masculinity in potential leaders' faces are valued more in a wartime context vs. peacetime context (Spisak et al., 2012;Re et al., 2013;Grabo and van Vugt, 2018). Preference for leader dominance seems to be uniquely driven by the intuitive notion that dominant leaders are better in giving an aggressive response in times of social conflict (Laustsen and Petersen, 2017). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global societal, economic, and social upheaval unseen in living memory. There have been substantial cross-national differences in the kinds of policies implemented by political decision-makers to prevent the spread of the virus, to test the population, and to manage infected patients. Among other factors, these policies vary with politicians’ sex: early findings indicate that, on average, female leaders seem more focused on minimizing direct human suffering caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while male leaders implement riskier short-term decisions, possibly aiming to minimize economic disruptions. These sex differences are consistent with broader findings in psychology, reflecting women’s stronger empathy, higher pathogen disgust, health concern, care-taking orientation, and dislike for the suffering of other people—as well as men’s higher risk-taking, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, and focus on financial indicators of success and status. This review article contextualizes sex differences in pandemic leadership in an evolutionary framework. Evolution by natural selection is the only known process in nature that organizes organisms into higher degrees of functional order, or counteracts the unavoidable disorder that would otherwise ensue, and is therefore essential for explaining the origins of human sex differences. Differential sexual selection and parental investment between males and females, together with the sexual differentiation of the mammalian brain, drive sex differences in cognition and behavioral dispositions, underlying men’s and women’s leadership styles and decision-making during a global pandemic. According to the sexually dimorphic leadership specialization hypothesis, general psychobehavioral sex differences have been exapted during human evolution to create sexually dimorphic leadership styles. They may be facultatively co-opted by societies and/or followers when facing different kinds of ecological and/or sociopolitical threats, such as disease outbreaks or intergroup aggression. Early evidence indicates that against the invisible viral foe that can bring nations to their knees, the strategic circumspection of empathic feminine health “worriers” may bring more effective and humanitarian outcomes than the devil-may-care incaution of masculine risk-taking “warriors”.
... In recent and in ancestral times, intergroup conflicts were frequent and entailed a substantial mortality rate (Bowles, 2009). Formidable and dominant male community leaders would have been preferred particularly in times of intergroup conflict and war (Hayden et al., 1986;Grabo and van Vugt, 2018;Garfield et al., 2019b), which could have resulted in higher reproductive success for the experienced warrior leaders (von Rueden et al., 2011;Glowacki and Wrangham, 2015;von Rueden and Jaeggi, 2016), despite the individual agency of the male leader being less crucial than social networks in betweengroup violence (Glowacki et al., 2016). Tigue et al. (2012) found that manipulated lower voice pitch of recordings of US presidents was more strongly associated with physical prowess in a wartime voting scenario and that participants preferred to vote for the candidate with the lower-pitched voice, which indicates dominance (Wolff and Puts, 2010;Aung and Puts, 2020). ...
... Similar results have been reported in other studies (Little et al., 2007;Halevy et al., 2012;Spisak et al., 2012). Facial cues associated with perceived height and masculinity in potential leaders' faces are valued more in a wartime context vs. peacetime context (Spisak et al., 2012;Re et al., 2013;Grabo and van Vugt, 2018). Preference for leader dominance seems to be uniquely driven by the intuitive notion that dominant leaders are better in giving an aggressive response in times of social conflict (Laustsen and Petersen, 2017). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global societal, economic, and social upheaval unseen in living memory. There have been substantial differences in the kinds of policies implemented by political decision-makers to prevent the spread of the virus, to test the population, and to manage infected patients. Among other factors, these policies vary with politicians’ sex: early findings indicate that, on average, female leaders seem more focused on minimizing direct human suffering caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while male leaders implement riskier short-term decisions, possibly aiming to minimize economic disruptions. These sex differences are consistent with broader findings in psychology, reflecting women’s stronger empathy, higher pathogen disgust, health concern, care-taking orientation, and dislike for the suffering of other people—as well as men’s higher risk-taking, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, and focus on financial indicators of success and status. This review article contextualizes sex differences in pandemic leadership in an evolutionary framework. Evolution by natural selection is the only known process in nature that organizes organisms into higher degrees of functional order, or counteracts the unavoidable disorder that would otherwise ensue, and is therefore essential for explaining the origins of human sex differences. Differential sexual selection and parental investment between males and females, together with the sexual differentiation of the mammalian brain, drive sex differences in cognition and behavioral dispositions, underlying men’s and women’s leadership styles and decision-making during a global pandemic. According to the sexually dimorphic leadership specialization hypothesis, general psychobehavioral sex differences have been exapted during human evolution to create sexually dimorphic leadership styles. They may be facultatively co-opted by societies and/or followers when facing different kinds of ecological and/or sociopolitical threats, such as disease outbreaks or intergroup aggression. Early evidence indicates that against the invisible viral foe that can bring nations to their knees, the strategic circumspection of empathic feminine health “worriers” may bring more effective and humanitarian outcomes than the devil-may-care incaution of masculine risk-taking “warriors”.
... The primary purpose of this study is to examine whether the tactic of content framed in the physical appearance of a political product impacts the self-concept of a person as the first source of information in social interaction. The self-concept supports this objective to the fact childhood to old age; various studies show that there is a strong tendency to attribute more positive qualities to those who are physically attractive concerning those who are physically unattractive (Grabo & van Vugt, 2018;Perlini et al., 2001;Pitesa & Thau, 2018) and differences in physical attractiveness affect social desirability judgments (Perlini, 2001). ...
Self-concept and marketing strategies can produce cognitive activations in the minds of people through physical appearance Schemes. A topic rarely addressed in academic literature is how to visualize a person as a consumer product. Through political marketing, it was analyzed how framing communications can produce cognitive activations through the self-concept of physical appearance. This, in turn, will have an impact on the consumption of politicians through the self-congruence effect. Highlighting a person's physical attributes through political marketing management is a powerful strategic resource that generates perceptions that then leads the receiver to make a quicker decision. The results reflect a conceptualization beyond consumer products, the psychological process of decisions between men and women. The results explain that just like a consumer product, the political candidate can be seen as a product since it keeps coherence and transmits the value to potential buyers (voters). In addition, self-concept of physical appearance establishes a social construction through the activations in the memory located in the individual perception that then generates congruence in the way in which they make their decisions.
... Behavioral scientists, as well as political scientists, continue to add nuance and rigor to our understanding of how humans instinctively engage questions of political leadership across many levels of analysis (Laustsen and Petersen 2018;Grabo and van Vugt 2018). ...
Evolutionary approaches to political science are part of a behavioral revolution that is helping to shed new light on old problems and inspire novel hypotheses on emerging puzzles (Hafner-Burton et al. 2017; Kertzer and Tingley 2018). Prior misconceptions of evolutionary theory and its application to the social sciences have been usefully corrected or placed in their proper context, such as claims that natural selection produces inflexibly selfish individuals or that evolutionary processes are indeterminate models of political preference (Lopez, McDermott, and Petersen 2011; Lopez 2014, 2016b).
An evolutionary model of political decision-making examines the link between a biological system and political outcomes, and explains the function of that biological system with reference to natural selection operating in ancestral environments (Lopez and McDermott 2012; Petersen 2015). Although our knowledge of ancestral environments is often incomplete, it is not fundamentally unknowable, necessitating methodological triangulation with complementary lines of evidence from many fields such as, but not limited to paleoanthropology, paleoarchaeology, geology, neuroscience, evolutionary game theory, primatology and behavioral ecology.
Contributions of evolutionists to our understanding of political decision-making has yielded tangible benefits to a range of research questions, such as: When and why do we cooperate (Milner 1992; Axelrod 2006)? What is the origin and nature of political preferences and ideology (Alford and Hibbing 2004; Alford, Funk, and Hibbing 2008; Fowler and Schreiber 2008; Hatemi et al. 2009; Petersen 2012)? Why might someone sacrifice their lives for their group (Choi and Bowles 2007; Whitehouse 2018)? Why are leaders simultaneously sources of inspiration and insecurity (Smith et al. 2007; Rose McDermott and Hatemi 2014; Rose McDermott, Lopez, and Hatemi 2016; Lopez 2019)? Evolutionary approaches do not make context-general predictions about the content of preferences or beliefs; rather, we expect that organisms are “adaptation executors,” exquisitely sensitive to context in ways that would have been ancestrally adaptive, even if it appears irrational or maladaptive in modern contexts. Sometimes the behavior we observe will be entirely consistent with rational expectations, while at other times it will not be. Put differently, evolutionary approaches can sometimes be used to buttress existing claims, while at others it offers an empirically and ecologically valid replacement (Camerer 1998; McDermott, Fowler, and Smirnov 2008).
Despite many gains, evolutionary approaches remain somewhat hindered by the same fundamental limitation that faces the behavioral sciences generally – the so-called “aggregation problem” (Powell 2017). However, this problem is tractable and no longer rests on fallacies that once asserted the blunt irrelevance of individual psychology. Instead, behavioral scientists progressively build a growing edifice of the many direct and indirect pathways by which individual psychology shapes political outcomes. The gains to be had are great, and the limitations are known and scalable.
Deriving inferences from facial appearance is called face-ism. In particular, people make rapid and accurate inferences about the targets' character based on their appearance. Over the last 15 years, the effects of a leader's facial appearance have been vigorously studied in the domain of psychology and leadership research worldwide. Previous studies suggest that facial appearance significantly predicts leader selection, thus leading more competent, dominant, trustworthy, and attractive individuals to be selected as leaders. Further, they indicate that this relationship depends on the circumstances (i.e., wartime and time of peace). The current study reviewed recent research on face-ism and leadership, while discussing the factors of the face effects, the main method, findings, limitations, and future directions of the research. Finally, the authors discussed the implications of face-ism in the field of military leadership.
Previous research has found that physical characteristics in faces that influence perceptions of trustworthiness and dominance have context-contingent effects on leadership perceptions. People whose faces are perceived to be trustworthy are judged to be better leaders in peacetime contexts than wartime contexts. By contrast, people whose faces are perceived to be dominant are judged to be better leaders in wartime contexts than peacetime contexts. Here, we tested for judgment-contingent (dominance vs. trustworthiness) effects of head tilt (i.e., head pitch rotation) on person perception and context-contingent (peacetime vs. wartime) effects of head tilt on leadership judgments. Although we found that head tilt influenced judgments of trustworthiness and dominance (Study 1), head tilt did not influence leadership judgments (Study 2). Together, these results suggest that the context-contingent effects of physical characteristics on leadership judgments reported in previous work do not necessarily extend to head tilt, even though head tilt influences perceptions of trustworthiness and dominance.
Group-perpetrated crime often involves leaders and followers, but it is not currently understood how peer groups form around leaders during a criminal incident. Impression formation research has shown that specific facial cues are associated with leadership and perceptions of leadership. We extend this research to leadership among group-perpetrated youth crime and examine its role in downstream sentencing outcomes. Study 1 revealed that leaders of groups may be perceived as more dominant than their followers. In Study 2, participants were tasked with selecting the leaders from their groups and were more likely to (correctly) select targets perceived as more dominant but also (incorrectly) select targets perceived as more Trustworthy. In Study 3, we examined whether facial impressions were associated with downstream sentencing outcomes. Perceptions of Trustworthiness were associated with reduced sentencing, but dominance was unrelated. The results underscore the role that facial appearance plays in group formation and sentencing among youth.
Humans have an evolved flexible followership psychology that enables them to select different leaders in different contexts, depending on their needs. We distinguish a triad of follower needs: (i) guidance into a shared direction, (ii) active protection against threats, and (iii) judicious dispute settlement. These needs relate to critical group coordination challenges described in biology and anthropology and to different evolutionary leadership theories. We describe the contexts in which these needs emerge, the characteristics of leaders who meet these needs, and the potential risks of following these leaders. We end by discussing the potential of our theory to aid the understanding of leadership in modern organizations, female leadership, leader manipulation of needs, and individual differences between followers.
