Addressing environmental challenges requires effective leadership to mobilize individuals, and coordinate collective efforts. However, what qualities do individuals seek in an environmental leader? Based on the evolutionary psychology of leadership and followership, we posit that certain characteristics of contemporary environmental issues bear similarities to recurring challenges encountered by early hominids, thus triggering the same fundamental follower needs. Specifically, we argue that dominant and authoritarian leaders might be appealing to followers particularly when they seek active protection in an immediate crisis. We tested this idea in an experiment that presented participants (n = 500) with three scenarios describing an event happening in the city where they live; a financial crisis, an environmental crisis, and a control condition. Participants were asked to imagine they were a member of the state council which was tasked to select the company that would be hired to handle the aftermath of the event. After this, participants were presented with 10 pairs of photos (randomly ordered and matched in attractiveness and age) depicting ostensible CEOs of the companies that applied for the job. Each pair depicted one male and one female CEOs. For each pair, participants were asked to indicate which company they would vote for; the male-led company or the female-led company (implicit leader preferences), and rate which leadership-related traits they would like to see in that leader (explicit leader preferences). Overall, linear mixed models controlling for the specific pairings between male and female CEOs, showed that male CEOs (over female ones) were preferred when participants were presented with an event involving a crisis (vs. the control condition) and this was particularly true for the financial crisis condition. Further, the crisis conditions also led participants to rate prototypically masculine traits as more desirable than prototypically feminine ones. Importantly, simple effects showed that this effect derived from participants in both crisis conditions rating prototypically feminine traits (vs. prototypically masculine traits) less favorably than in the control condition. We discuss these results in relation to the literature on evolutionary-derived leadership preferences, as well as in terms of what they might mean for environmental leadership.

Dr. Gonzalo Palomo-Vélez is an Assistant Professor of Social and Evolutionary Psychology at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICSO) at O'Higgins University in Chile. His research in environmental and applied social psychology focuses on studying the functional and social motives that underlie people's environmental actions. Before his current position, Dr. Palomo-Vélez worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, where he explored the dynamics of individual and institutional factors influencing the public acceptability of energy production. In 2020, he earned his Ph.D. in evolutionary and social psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Mark van Vugt and Prof. Dr. Joshua Tybur.