The Big Man Mechanism: how prestige fosters cooperation and creates prosocial leaders

Abstract

Anthropological evidence from diverse societies suggests that prestige-based leadership may provide a foundation for cooperation in many contexts. Here, inspired by such ethnographic observations and building on a foundation of existing research on the evolution of prestige, we develop a set of formal models to explore when an evolved prestige psychology might drive the cultural evolution of n-person cooperation, and how such a cultural evolutionary process might create novel selection pressures for genes that make prestigious individuals more prosocial. Our results reveal (i) how prestige can foster the cultural emergence of cooperation by generating correlated behavioural phenotypes, both between leaders and followers, and among followers; (ii) why, in the wake of cultural evolution, natural selection favours genes that make prestigious leaders more prosocial, but only when groups are relatively small; and (iii), why the effectiveness of status differences in generating cooperation in large groups depends on cultural transmission (and not primarily on deference or coercion). Our theoretical framework, and the specific predictions made by these models, sketch out an interdisciplinary research programme that cross-cuts anthropology, biology, psychology and economics. Some of our predictions find support from laboratory work in behavioural economics and are consistent with several real-world patterns.

Creating an Efficient Culture of Cooperation

“…For simplicity these views are turned into the group's social choice via majority vote. While elections may not occur explicitly in small scale societies, the superior authority of single individuals in these societies is often based on a group consensus (Henrich, Chudek, & Boyd, 2015), and the simplest way to implement a consensus in our experiment is through voting.…”

Cultural group selection and human cooperation: a conceptual and empirical review

“…It is often assumed that differences in cooperative behaviour are socially learned, such as by conformism (Boyd and Richerson 1985), copying cooperative prestigious individuals or pay-off-biased imitation (Boyd and Richerson 2002). While individuals do appear to learn some cooperative behaviour via social learning, when it is employed it tends to be based on pay-off-biased transmission (Burton-Chellew et al 2017), rather than conformism (Lamba 2014; little empirical work has explored whether adults learn cooperative behaviour via prestige-bias; see Henrich et al 2015). Individuals also readily adapt their behaviour via individual evaluations of the situation: for instance, in the absence of social learning individuals alter their cooperative behaviour in consistently adaptive directions according to cues of anonymity (Ernest-Jones et al 2011), whether competition is within or between groups (Puurtinen and Mappes 2009), and whether interactions are repeated (Rand and Nowak 2013).…”

Solving the puzzle of collective action through inter-individual differences

“…Henrich et al [44] show that a psychology for copying the prestigious can facilitate collective action. They develop a formal model, in which prestigious leaders act prosocially with some probability, and group members decide whether to cooperate or defect based in part on their propensity to copy the leader.…”

“…The emergence and stability of collective action depend on how likely followers are to learn cooperative behaviour from leaders, followers' retention of cooperative behaviour over time and the transmission of cooperative behaviour via social learning to subsequent generations. Based on their model, Henrich et al [44] argue that leaders can facilitate collective action independent of any special role in coordination, monitoring or sanctioning of group members, as a result of prestige-biased cultural learning. Following this process of cultural evolution, they then show that natural selection can promote even greater prosociality in prestigious individuals (though the effects of selection depend on group size).…”

“…Following this process of cultural evolution, they then show that natural selection can promote even greater prosociality in prestigious individuals (though the effects of selection depend on group size). Henrich et al [44] suggest that in non-human rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org Phil. Trans.…”