Silvia Guillén Marin

Scientific and theoretical evidence suggests that the perception and evaluation of leaders are influenced by cognitive mechanisms that allow individuals to rapidly infer relevant traits from social cues, such as facial appearance. Within this framework, the Evolved Followership Psychology theory (Van Vugt & Ahuja, 2010; Van Vugt & Grabo, 2015) and the Adaptive Followership Theory (Laustsen & Petersen, 2020) propose that preferences for specific leadership traits emerge from adaptive psychological mechanisms that are sensitive to social context. From this perspective, facial cues function as rapid signals that guide the social perception of potential leaders. This research examines how facial dominance influences leadership perception and leadership choice across different social contexts, integrating insights from evolutionary psychology, political psychology, and social cognition. Specifically, the dissertation investigates how facial cues associated with dominance shape leadership preferences, how these effects vary depending on contextual conditions (conflict vs. cooperation), and how individual differences among perceivers modulate these preferences.

The project is structured around four empirical studies that combine perceptual evaluations, leadership choice tasks, and real-world political outcomes. First, the research examines whether facial dominance predicts electoral success in real political contexts, analyzing whether voters attribute higher dominance to the candidate who ultimately wins an election. This analysis is conducted using a Spanish adult sample collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, a context characterized by heightened social threat and uncertainty. Second, the research explores the perceptual consensus in facial dominance judgments across age groups and cultures. This involves comparing dominance evaluations from Spanish adults with leadership choices made by Spanish children (considered a politically naïve population) to examine intergenerational consensus. In addition, a cross-cultural comparison between Spanish and Argentine adult samples assesses whether perceptions of facial dominance replicate across cultural contexts and whether cultural schemas influence the evaluation of facial stimuli. Third, the dissertation investigates how individual differences (including political ideology, social dominance orientation, perceived risk, emotional states, and sociodemographic factors) affect preferences for dominant-looking leaders. This analysis allows for testing theoretical expectations derived from the Adaptive Followership Theory, which proposes that followers calibrate their leadership preferences depending on perceived threats and personal predispositions. Finally, the research examines the moderating role of social context, comparing leadership preferences in cooperative versus conflictual situations using politically naïve populations. Leadership choices made by Spanish children in experimentally induced cooperative contexts are contrasted with decisions from Argentine adults experiencing economic instability, enabling the study of how context shapes preferences for dominant versus less dominant leaders. Methodologically, the research combines ecologically valid stimuli (real political candidates), standardized facial dominance manipulations, naïve populations, and cross-cultural samples, while employing both descriptive analyses of collective trends and trial-by-trial hierarchical models (GLMM) that account for the nested structure of decision data. Overall, the project contributes to the literature on leadership perception by showing how facial dominance interacts with social context and individual predispositions, offering a more ecologically grounded understanding of how followers select leaders in real-world settings.