Major study points to evolved psychology behind support for strongmen

A new study published in Evolution and Human Behavior suggests that people around the world are more likely to favor dominant, authoritarian leaders during times of intergroup conflict. Drawing on data from 25 countries, the researchers found consistent evidence that both perceived and actual conflict are linked to increased preferences for leaders with dominant traits. These findings support the idea that humans may be equipped with a psychological system that evolved to prioritize strong leadership when faced with external threats.

The study aimed to explore whether support for dominant leaders is a universal human tendency that becomes stronger in response to conflict. Across history, powerful figures—many with authoritarian traits—have often gained popular support during wartime or periods of social unrest. Yet, research has also shown that voters usually prefer leaders who are warm and competent. This raises the question: why do dominant leaders still rise to power so frequently, even when they may not represent voters’ default preferences?

One explanation is rooted in evolutionary psychology. Human ancestors often faced dangerous intergroup conflicts, such as attacks from rival tribes. In these contexts, following a physically dominant and aggressive leader may have increased group survival. The researchers behind this study, led by Mark van Vugt (a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Lasse Laustsen (an associate professor at Aarhus University), proposed that modern humans retain this instinct.

“Both of us have held a strong and long-lived interest in understanding why citizens and followers across societies come to prefer seemingly dominant, authoritarian and strong leaders over the alternatives,” van Vugt and Laustsen told PsyPost.

“Because we are both trained in evolutionary psychology, we both worked on projects trying to answer this question based on evolutionary models of followership and leadership. A common finding across our (and others’) findings is that the more followers tend to perceive society as conflict-ridden the more they turn to dominant, strong and authoritarian leaders.

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“Thus, when we met at a workshop co-organized by Christopher von Rueden (University of Richmond) and Mark in 2017, we decided to test the universality of this relationship leveraging our professional networks to collect data across all continents and across as many countries as possible.

“Importantly, if—as we argue in our article and previous work—’the intergroup conflict – dominant leader nexus’ is rooted in evolved psychological systems then we should expect humans more or less everywhere to display increased preferences for dominant leaders when assigned to conflict situations (compared to no conflict situations).”

The research team conducted a large-scale, multi-country investigation involving 5,008 participants from a diverse set of nations including the United States, China, Kenya, Russia, and Chile. Participants were recruited from student populations, convenience samples, and nationally representative groups, depending on the country. Surveys were conducted online between October 2019 and November 2020.

The researchers designed a set of four tests to examine how intergroup conflict shapes leadership preferences. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: a war scenario, a peace scenario, or a neutral control condition. Those in the war group were told to imagine their country was under threat, while those in the peace group were asked to imagine a calm and friendly international situation. Participants were then shown pairs of faces, one subtly altered to appear more dominant, and asked which person they would prefer to lead their country.

In the first test, participants in the war condition were significantly more likely to choose the dominant-looking faces as leaders. Across all countries, 54% of participants in the war condition preferred the dominant face, compared to 46% in the control condition and 42% in the peace condition. In other words, perceived conflict increased support for dominant-looking leaders, while peace reduced it. This pattern was consistent in 19 of the 25 countries, suggesting a broad cross-cultural effect.

“We were both surprised to see the high consistency of our experimental results (i.e. that subjects assigned to the war condition displayed stronger preferences for dominant leaders than subjects in the control or peace conditions) across countries,” van Vugt and Laustsen told PsyPost. “Yet, at the same time we were also surprised to see that the countries where this pattern was not supported was Nigeria and Russia. We can only speculate about the reasons why these countries depart from the overall pattern.”

The second test looked at participants’ explicit preferences for leadership traits, including dominance, warmth, and competence. Participants in the war condition were more likely to say they wanted a dominant leader, and less likely to prioritize warmth. Preferences for competence, however, remained stable regardless of the scenario. This supports the idea that conflict specifically increases desire for dominance, not just any leadership trait.

The third test focused on individual differences. People who scored higher on measures of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation—psychological scales that assess how dangerous or competitive someone believes the world to be—were more likely to prefer dominant leaders. These tendencies remained significant even after controlling for age, gender, income, and education.

The fourth and final test looked at country-level factors. In countries with a history of armed conflict or high military spending, people expressed stronger average preferences for dominant leadership. For example, countries that had participated in more intergroup wars or spent more per capita on their military showed higher support for dominant traits in leaders. Although these correlations were smaller than those found in the other tests, they offered additional support for the theory.

Taken together, the results suggest that humans may have an evolved tendency to favor dominant leaders in response to perceived threat. This “followership psychology” likely developed over millennia when strong, forceful leaders were better able to protect groups from external enemies. Although such instincts may have been useful in small-scale societies, they may not serve us as well in the context of modern nation-states and complex international diplomacy.

“We see our results as important for theoretical reasons, but also for understanding ongoing conflicts around the world and rising preferences for dominant and strong leaders,” van Vugt and Laustsen explained. “Theoretically, our results add yet another piece of evidence that humans reasons about leadership and followership based on evolved psychological systems tightly linked to perceptions of conflict. This is important for understanding how humans facing real war (e.g., the ongoing war in Ukraine) or threats of future conflicts and attacks (e.g. the Chinese threat on Taiwan) reason about leadership.”

“In particular our findings are important if one wishes to de-escalate conflicts. One take on the ‘the intergroup conflict – dominant leader nexus’ is that it creates a vicious circle in which dominant leaders are preferred due to rising conflict, but these same dominant leaders are likely to further intensify conflicts through their aggressive and dominant tactics and behaviors. Consequently, understanding that breaking this nexus is going to be hard as it likely rests on evolved psychological systems and intuitions constitutes a main take-away from our article.”

While the findings offer strong support for the conflict hypothesis, there are some limitations. The majority of participants were university-educated and recruited online, which could limit generalizability to broader populations. And while the face-based tasks were designed to subtly manipulate perceptions of dominance, there is always a risk that participants guessed the study’s purpose.

“As with most social science survey experiments, readers of our article should keep in mind that results rest on self-reported preferences by participants who may not have any concrete experience with war or conflict (yet, we also want to stress that given the wide variety of sampled countries war and conflict experience is probably higher in our study than in most previous work on the topic),” the researchers noted.

“However, in another project based on a sample of Ukrainian individuals in the first months after the Russian invasion, we find Ukrainians thinking about the ongoing war display stronger preferences for dominant leaders than Ukrainians thinking about a peaceful future (see this link for a short blog-post about the study: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/naturally-selected/202205/war-and-the-preference-strong-leader). That is, the results reported in our current article replicate patterns obtained from individuals facing actual war providing further credence to the key message that preferences for dominant leaders are tightly connected to perceptions and experiences of intergroup conflict and war.”

The researchers are now exploring several follow-up questions. “We are pursuing different directions in future projects. Some of our work ties impressions of leader dominance to various kinds of behavior and opinion statements from leaders. For instance, one project tests if undemocratic behavior affects impressions of dominance, which—based on preliminary results—seems to be the case.”

“Another project investigates if “the intergroup conflict – dominant leader nexus” is already in place among pre-school children or, if it is not, at what age conflict becomes linked to preferences for dominant leaders. Finally, other projects investigate if other types of contexts have also molded human leader preferences giving rise to preferences for other character traits in leaders when societies face other kinds of situations and scenarios.”

The authors also noted that the logistical demands of this study were immense, requiring collaboration with researchers across dozens of countries and enduring delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the challenges, the team believes the effort was worthwhile. By uncovering a consistent global pattern in how people respond to conflict, the study sheds light on the psychological roots of political behavior and helps explain why strongman leaders continue to appeal to so many—especially in turbulent times.

The study, “Cross-cultural evidence that intergroup conflict heightens preferences for dominant leaders: A 25-country study,” was authored by Lasse Laustsen, Xiaotian Sheng, M. Ghufran Ahmad, Laith Al-Shawaf, Benjamin Banai, Irena Pavela Banai, Michael Barlev, Nicolas Bastardoz, Alexander Bor, Joey T. Cheng, Anna Chmielińska, Alexandra Cook, Kyriaki Fousiani, Zachary H. Garfield, Maliki Ghossainy, Shang E. Ha, Tingting Ji, Benedict C. Jones, Michal Kandrik, Catherine Chiugo Kanu, Douglas T. Kenrick, Tobias L. Kordsmeyer, Cristhian A. Martínez, Honorata Mazepus, Jiaqing O, Ike Ernest Onyishi, Boguslaw Pawlowski, Lars Penke, Michael Bang Petersen, Richard Ronay, Daniel Sznycer, Gonzalo Palomo-Vélez, Christopher R. von Rueden, Israel Waismel-Manor, Adi Wiezel, and Mark van Vugt.