Across the globe we witness the rise of populist authoritarian leaders who are overbearing in their narrative, aggressive in behavior, and often exhibit questionable moral character. Drawing on evolutionary theory of leadership emergence, in which dominance and prestige are seen as dual routes to leadership, we provide a situational and psychological account for when and why dominant leaders are preferred over other respected and admired candidates. We test our hypothesis using three studies, encompassing more than 140,000 participants, across 69 countries and spanning the past two decades. We find robust support for our hypothesis that under a situational threat of economic uncertainty (as exemplified by the poverty rate, the housing vacancy rate, and the unemployment rate) people escalate their support for dominant leaders. Further, we find that this phenomenon is mediated by participants' psychological sense of a lack of personal control. Together, these results provide large-scale, globally representative evidence for the structural and psychological antecedents that increase the preference for dominant leaders over their prestigious counterparts.rom the recent Brexit vote in the United Kingdom (1), to the resurgence of nationalism in communist China (2), to the ascend of the authoritarian Narendra Modi in India (3), to the overwhelming support for Donald Trump in the US elections (4), we are witnessing a return of populist, authoritarian leaders, with rhetoric focused on nationalism and protectionism of indigenous citizens. Despite the general notion and research findings indicating that such individuals are often narcissistic, aggressive, and guided by a vague moral compass (5), their popularity remains steadfast even in the presence of other respected and admired candidates. This paper investigates when and why dominant leaders, despite the multitude of negative attributes associated with them, are often revered by a nation's citizens.We contend that the preference for a dominant leader increases with uncertainty and competitive threats in one's environment. When faced with a milieu of uncertainty and the resulting psychological lack of control, individuals favor a dominant/authoritarian leader who, they believe, has the capability to brave unfavorable winds and increase their future chances of success. We draw upon relevant literature in social psychology (6, 7), political psychology (8), and evolutionary psychology (9, 10) to develop our theoretical arguments.

We propose that promotive voice, or the expression of suggestions for improving work practices in the organization, and prohibitive voice, or the expression of warnings about factors that can harm the organization, are differentially influenced by employees' dispositional inclination to be approach and avoidance oriented. Drawing on multisource survey data from 291 employees and their managers, we found that approach orientation had positive relationship with promotive voice and negative relationship with prohibitive voice. By contrast, avoidance orientation had positive relationship with prohibitive voice and negative relationship with promotive voice. Further, voice role expectations, or employees' beliefs about the extent to which a particular form of voice is expected from them in their daily work, moderated the effects of approach and avoidance orientations. Highlighting the unique nature of voice as a behavior that is especially sensitive to situational cues, the effects of approach and avoidance orientations on promotive and prohibitive voice were stronger when role expectations for that form of voice were weaker. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

When actors transgress social norms, their social status colors the severity with which observers punish them. While some argue society judges high-status transgressors more harshly than they judge their low-status counterparts, others contend high-status transgressors receive the more lenient treatment in ambiguous transgressions. We reconcile this theoretical inconsistency, for we propose the ability of social status to color third party judgements of transgression and behavior towards the transgressor crucially depends on the status strategy with which high-status actors operate. Drawing on evolutionary theories of dominance and prestige as two viable means of preserving status within social hierarchies, we contend third parties penalize actors who exert and maintain their status via dominance more vehemently than they penalize actors who wield status via prestige. Across multiple studies that spanned archival field data, controlled lab experiments, and employed different instantiations of dominance, prestige, and misconduct, we consistently demonstrate others punish dominant high-status actors more gravely than prestige based high-status actors. Furthermore, we find intentionality attributions and lack of moral credentials explain harsher punishment meted out to dominant compared to prestige based highstatus actors. Collectively, these findings provide both a parsimonious reconciliation of inconsistency in the extant literature and a theoretical understanding of how nuanced status strategies of high-status actors differentially affects judgement, decisions and behaviors of third party others.

Sharing of misinformation can be catastrophic, especially during times of national importance.Typically studied in political contexts, sharing of fake news has been positively linked with conservative political ideology. However, such sweeping generalizations run the risk of increasing already rampant political polarization. We offer a more nuanced account by proposing that the sharing of fake news is largely driven by low conscientiousness conservatives. At high levels of conscientiousness there is no difference between liberals and conservatives. We find support for our hypotheses in the contexts of Covid-19, political, and neutral news across 8 studies (six pre-registered; two conceptual replications) with 4,642 participants and 91,144 unique participant-news observations. A general desire for chaos explains the interactive effect of political ideology and conscientiousness on the sharing of fake news. Furthermore, our findings indicate the inadequacy of fact-checker interventions to deter the spread of fake news. This underscores the challenges associated with tackling fake news, especially during a crisis like Covid-19 where misinformation impairs the ability of governments to curtail the pandemic.

Leaders strive to encourage helping behaviors among employees, as it positively affects both organizational and team effectiveness. However, the manner in which a leader influences others can unintentionally limit this desired behavior. Drawing on social learning theory, we contend that a leader's tendency to influence others via dominance could decrease employees' interpersonal helping. Dominant leaders, who influence others by being assertive and competitive, shape their subordinates' cognitive schema of success based on zero-sum thinking. Employees with a zero-sum mindset are more likely to believe that they can only make progress at the expense of others. We further propose that this zero-sum mindset results in less interpersonal helping among subordinates. We test our hypotheses by employing different operationalizations of our key variables in eight studies of which four are reported in the manuscript and another four in supplementary information (SI) across a combined sample of 147,780 observations. These studies include a large archival study, experiments with both laboratory and online samples, and a time-lagged field study with employees from 50 different teams. Overall, this research highlights the unintended consequences that dominant leaders have on their followers' helping behavior by increasing their zero-sum mindset.