Social identity theory of leadership research confirms that followers prefer group prototypical to non-prototypical leaders. Drawing on uncertainty -identity theory, we argue that self-uncertainty interacts with need for cognition (NC) to influence this preference. Student participants (N ¼ 100) reported their self-uncertainty and NC before evaluating a prospective prototypical or nonprototypical student leader. We reasoned that self-uncertainty is a cognitive demand causing low NC participants to use prototypicality as a leadership heuristic-uncertainty strengthens the leader prototypicality advantage. In contrast, high NC participants rely less on prototypicality as a heuristic-uncertainty weakens the leader prototypicality advantage. These hypotheses were supported-elevated uncertainty strengthened the leader prototypicality advantage when NC was low, but weakened it when NC was high.

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The popularity of news personalities (e.g., Bill O'Reilly, Rachel Maddow), comedy news such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and news magazines such as 20/20 might imply that viewers turn to such shows to formulate their own opinions about current events. This type of programming contains a considerable amount of (often biased) commentator opinion (