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.

The present research focused on how environmental harshness may affect heterosexual women's preferences of potential male mates’ facial characteristics, namely masculinity–femininity. The evidence on this issue is mixed and mostly from Western samples. We aimed to provide causal evidence using a sample of Turkish women and Turkish male faces. A video-based manipulation was developed to heighten environmental harshness perceptions. In the main experiment, participants were primed with resource scarcity, pathogen prevalence or neither (control). They then saw masculinised vs. feminised versions of the same faces and indicated the face that they would prefer for a long-term relationship and separately rated the faces on various dimensions. In general, masculinised faces were perceived as slightly more attractive, slightly healthier and much more formidable. A multilevel Bayesian model showed that pathogen prevalence lowered the preference for masculinised faces while resource scarcity weakly elevated it. The overall drop in attractiveness ratings in cases of high perceived pathogen prevalence, one of the strongest effects we observed, suggests that during epidemics, the formation of new relationships is not a favourable strategy. Implications for evolutionary theories of mate preference are discussed.