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In the evolving landscape of crisis leadership and emergency management, artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as a potentially transformative force with far-reaching implications. Utilizing the POP-DOC Loop, a comprehensive framework for crisis leadership analysis and decision-making, this paper delves into the diverse roles that AI is poised to play in shaping the future of crisis planning and response. The POP-DOC Loop serves as a structured methodology, encompassing key elements such as information gathering, contextual analysis informed by social determinants, enhanced predictive modeling, guided decision-making, strategic action implementation, and appropriate communication. Rather than offer definitive predictions, this review aims to catalyze exploration and discussion, equipping researchers and practitioners to anticipate future contingencies. The paper concludes by examining the limitations and challenges posed by AI within this specialized context.

Tasks driven by artificial intelligence (AI), such as evaluating video job interviews, rely on facial recognition systems for decision-making. Therefore, it is extremely important that the science behind this technology is continually advancing. If not, visual stereotypes, such as those associated with facial age and gender, will lead to dangerous misapplications of AI.

There are concerns that climate change attention is waning as competing global threats intensify. To investigate this possibility, we analyzed all link shares and reshares on Meta's Facebook platform (e.g., shares and reshares of news articles) in the United States from August 2019 to December 2020 (containing billions of aggregated and de-identified shares and reshares). We then identified all link shares and reshares on "climate change" and "global warming" from this repository to develop a social media salience index-the Climate SMSI score-and found an 80% decrease in climate change content sharing and resharing as COVID-19 spread during the spring of 2020. Climate change salience then briefly rebounded in the autumn of 2020 during a period of record-setting wildfires and droughts in the United States before returning to low content sharing and resharing levels. This fluctuating pattern suggests new climate communication strategies-focused on "systemic sustainability"-are necessary in an age of competing global crises., Competing Interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: Yuwei Liu is a former data scientist for Facebook and Bogdan State is a former employee of Facebook who currently works for Scie.nz. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

Previous research indicates that followers tend to contingently match particular leader qualities to evolutionarily consistent situations requiring collective action (i.e., context-specific cognitive leadership prototypes) and information processing undergoes categorization which ranks certain qualities as first-order context-general and others as second-order context-specific. To further investigate this contingent categorization phenomenon we examined the "attractiveness halo"-a first-order facial cue which significantly biases leadership preferences. While controlling for facial attractiveness, we independently manipulated the underlying facial cues of health and intelligence and then primed participants with four distinct organizational dynamics requiring leadership (i.e., competition vs. cooperation between groups and exploratory change vs. stable exploitation). It was expected that the differing requirements of the four dynamics would contingently select for relatively healthier- or intelligent-looking leaders. We found perceived facial intelligence to be a second-order context-specific trait-for instance, in times requiring a leader to address between-group cooperation-whereas perceived health is significantly preferred across all contexts (i.e., a first-order trait). The results also indicate that facial health positively affects perceived masculinity while facial intelligence negatively affects perceived masculinity, which may partially explain leader choice in some of the environmental contexts. The limitations and a number of implications regarding leadership biases are discussed.

This paper examines the impact of facial cues on leadership emergence. Using evolutionary social psychology, we expand upon implicit and contingent theories of leadership and propose that different types of intergroup relations elicit different implicit cognitive leadership prototypes. It is argued that a biologically based hormonal connection between behavior and corresponding facial characteristics interacts with evolutionarily consistent social dynamics to influence leadership emergence. We predict that masculine-looking leaders are selected during intergroup conflict (war) and feminine-looking leaders during intergroup cooperation (peace). Across two experiments we show that a general categorization of leader versus nonleader is an initial implicit requirement for emergence, and at a context-specific level facial cues of masculinity and femininity contingently affect war versus peace leadership emergence in the predicted direction. In addition, we replicate our findings in Experiment 1 across culture using Western and East Asian samples. In Experiment 2, we also show that masculine-feminine facial cues are better predictors of leadership than male-female cues. Collectively, our results indicate a multi-level classification of context-specific leadership based on visual cues imbedded in the human face and challenge traditional distinctions of male and female leadership.

As nation-state leaders age they increasingly engage in inter-state militarized disputes yet in industrialized societies a steady decrease in testosterone associated with aging is observed--which suggests a decrease in dominance behavior. The current paper points out that from modern societies to Old World monkeys increasing both in age and social status encourages dominant strategies to maintain acquired rank. Moreover, it is argued this consistency has shaped an implicit prototype causing followers to associate older age with dominance leadership. It is shown that (i) faces of older leaders are preferred during intergroup conflict and (ii) morphing U.S. Presidential candidates to appear older or younger has an overriding effect on actual election outcomes. This indicates that democratic voting can be systematically adjusted by activating innate biases. These findings appear to create a new line of research regarding the biology of leadership and contextual cues of age.

This experiment investigated potential gender biases in the emergence of leadership in groups. Teams played a public-goods game under conditions of intra- or intergroup competition. We predicted and found a strong preference for female leaders during intragroup competition and male leaders during intergroup competition. Furthermore, during intragroup competition, a female leader was more instrumental than a male leader in raising group investments, but this pattern was reversed during intergroup competition. These findings suggest that particular group threats elicit specific gender-biased leader prototypes. We speculate about the evolutionary and cultural origins of these sex differences in the emergence of leadership.