Leadership in dangerous times: Life-history strategy and environmental condition affect preferences for dominant and prestigious leaders

Dominance and prestige, as two distinct status-attaining qualities, are present in modern-day leaders at various levels of social hierarchies to various degrees. From an evolutionary perspective, we speculate that such leadership qualities are implicitly linked to the leadership preferences of followers in the environments where they are more effective or necessary. Moreover, individuals’ life-history strategy might moderate the effect of some contextual factors, such as environmental danger, on leadership preferences of dominant versus prestigious leaders. Three studies tested these hypotheses. In two implicit association test (IAT) experiments, we found that (1) participants implicitly associated danger with dominance, and safety with prestige (Study 1a, N = 32); (2) the relative strength of the implicit association between positive evaluation and prestige is positively correlated with participants’ slow life-history strategy (Study 1b, N = 67). In a third experiment (Study 2, N = 95), self-reported life-history strategy also moderated the effects of experimentally manipulated danger on leadership preferences. The association between dangerous environments and dominant leadership preference was stronger for participants with fast life-history strategies than those with slow life-history strategies.