An Experimental Simulation of the Cultural Transmission of Prestige and Dominance Social Rank Cues

Abstract

Informal social hierarchies within small human groups are argued to be based on prestige, dominance, or a combination of these two (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). Prestige-based hierarchies entail the ordering of individuals by the level of admiration and respect they receive from others due to their competence within valued domains. This type of hierarchy provides benefits for subordinates such as high-quality social learning opportunities and both private and public goods. In contrast, dominance-based hierarchies entail the ordering of individuals by their capacity to win fights, coerce and intimidate others. This type of hierarchy produces costs in subordinates due to its aggressive and intimidating nature. Given the benefits and costs associated with these types of social hierarchies for subordinates, we hypothesized that prestige and dominance cues are better recalled and transmitted than social rank cues that do not elicit high prestige or dominance associations (here medium social rank cues). Assuming that for the majority of the population who are not already at the top of the social hierarchy it is more important to avoid the costs of dominance-based hierarchies than to obtain the benefits of prestige-based hierarchies, we hypothesized that dominance cues are better transmitted than prestige cues. We conducted a recall-based transmission chain experiment with 30 chains of four generations each (N=120). Participants read and recalled three descriptions of prestigious, dominant and medium social rank footballers, and their recall was then passed to the next participant within their chain. As predicted, we found that both prestige cues and dominance cues were better transmitted than medium social rank cues. However, we did not find support for our prediction of the better transmission of dominance cues over prestige cues. We discuss whether the results might be explain by a specific social-rank content transmission bias or by a more general emotional content transmission bias.

When do people prefer dominant over prestigious political leaders?

“…However, Study 2 clearly shows that people perceive the dominance and prestige of political leaders differently depending on their own ideological similarity to those political leaders. Furthermore, as economic uncertainty does not seem to affect people's voting decision directly, we suggest looking at the political discourse of right-wing populist leaders and how it interacts with the discourse of other political actors, to explain their rise in electoral popularity (for further discussion see Jiménez, 2020, pp. 255–260).…”

Prestige and dominance: a review of the Dual Evolutionary Model of Social Hierarchy

“…One exception is a recent study conducted by Roberts, Palermo, and Visser (2019). These researchers manipulated dominance and prestige through the use of first-order cues Jiménez & Mesoudi, 2019, December 28): faces rated as high or low in dominance and CVs considered to be high (e.g., succeeding in a career in medicine) or low (e.g., having dropped from university) in prestige. The attentional blink (AB) task was used in this study, which entails the rapid visualisation of a series of stimuli including two targets and a number of distractors (scrambled human faces and dog faces).…”

“…First-order (e.g., physical formidability) and second-order cues (e.g., fear displayed towards the target individual) are also used for identifying who is dominant. The use of these cues is adaptive as it helps to prevent potential costs by individually and socially learning who is more likely to cause those costs without having to directly suffer themselves the dominant behaviour (Jiménez & Mesoudi, 2019, December 28).…”