Joey T. Cheng - The Psychology of Social Status

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Joey T. Cheng

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The Dominance-Prestige Account (Henrich and Gil-White ), the Dominance-Prestige Account argues explicitly, on the basis of evolutionary logic, that both avenues persist in contemporary human groups, and produce patterns of behaviors and tactics that effectively promote influence over others, even when wielded within the same social group.

First, Dominance entails the induction of fear , through intimidation and coercion, to attain or maintain rank and influence , and is thought to be homologous with dominance hierarchical systems in nonhuman primates that result from agonistic contests (Chase et al. ). In contrast to prior models, however, the present account proposes that coercion and intimidation are not the only means to human social-rank attainment; rather, a secondary pathway, termed Prestige, is thought to co-exist and operate concurrently.

Prestige refers to influence that is willingly granted to individuals who are recognized and respected for their skills, success, or knowledge. Subordinates seek out the opinions and company of Prestigious individuals in efforts to imitate and learn their superior skills or knowledge. As a result, the Prestigious are conferred with influence and rank, which in their cases rests on freely conferred deference and genuine persuasion, rather than forced compliance. Prestige-based rank is thought to be unique to humans, because it relies on cultural learning, which is considered to be less developed in other animals (Boyd and Richerson ). Learning from the most skilled group members is a low-cost way of acquiring fitness-maximizing knowledge, so the emergence of cultural learning in early human evolutionary history likely generated selection pressures to preferentially identify, attend to, and copy knowledge from highly skilled or successful others. These selection pressures would favor a psychological machinery capable of differentiating and ranking individuals along the dimension of skill (and, thus, Prestige), such that the highest quality cultural models with the greatest expertise are elevated to the top of the hierarchy.

The assumption that earned respect represents a fundamental path to rank attainment in humans is consistent with the predominant view of rank attainment within social psychology, which assumes that hierarchical differences result from groups members rational and freely chosen decisions to confer rank upon those individuals who possess and offer the greatest skills and ability to contribute to the group (e.g., Anderson and Kilduff ).

The distinction between Dominance and Prestige parallels Krackles ().

However, unlike these prior descriptive taxonomies, the Dominance-Prestige Account was theoretically derived and provides an evolutionarily based explanation of why these widely observed patterns occur. The strong theoretical basis of this account allows for the formulation of precise yet broad predictions regarding the suites of traits, emotions , cognitions, and behaviors expected to propel and underpin these two avenues to rank. Furthermore, this account is unique, in that it incorporates both our species shared heritage with other primates who resolve conflicts through domination-subordination coordination, and our unique human nature as cultural beings who depend heavily on cultural learning (Henrich and Gil-White ). The accounts breadth also gives it the potential to unify prior theoretical efforts and to integrate the somewhat scattered extant literature on power, status , and leadership into a coherent account, by parsing these prior results into Dominance- or Prestige-based processes.