The Appearance of Success: Facial Dominance and Leadership Election in Naïve Populations in Cooperative Contexts

First impressions are crucial in inferring personality traits and play a significant role in leadership selection. Research in Western societies shows that voters tend to prefer leaders whose facial features align with the situational context, dominant faces in conflict scenarios, and less dominant ones in cooperative settings. Limited political knowledge increases reliance on facial cues, a phenomenon also observed in children, who often demonstrate high consensus and predictive accuracy. This study examines whether, in cooperative contexts, a less dominant facial appearance predicts electoral success among voters with low political knowledge. A sample of children aged 9 to 12 was used to test the hypothesis that lower facial dominance is positively correlated with being chosen as a leader. Results confirmed the hypothesis: Children preferred candidates with less dominant features in a cooperative context, supporting the influence of appearance in leadership judgments. Furthermore, children and adults showed consistent criteria in identifying facial dominance, clearly distinguishing between dominant and nondominant faces. These findings validate the role of facial appearance as a heuristic in leader selection, particularly among naïve populations. They also confirm that contextual factors influence the impact of facial traits on social decision-making, underscoring the effect of appearance in shaping political and leadership preferences.