The evolution of prestige: freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission
Introduction
This paper explores the evolution and psychology of noncoerced, interindividual, within-group, human status asymmetries — or prestige. We distinguish prestige from dominance and argue that each has its own distinct psychology, selected for by distinct evolutionary pressures. In the first part, we explain how the selective forces unleashed by the evolution of certain forms of cultural transmission generated a prestige psychology that further enhanced our cultural learning capabilities. In the second part, we test a series of predictions derived from our evolutionary analysis using data from across the social sciences.
Social scientists have not converged on a common taxonomy of social asymmetries, classifying them inconsistently and variously as “status,” “prestige,” “power,” or “dominance” differences. One scheme divides status into “legal,” “traditional,” and “charismatic” Weber, 1946, Weber, 1958. Another into “prestige,” “dominance,” and “wealth” (Goode, 1978). Archaeologists divide status into “ascribed” (e.g., chiefdoms and states) and “achieved” (e.g., “big man” societies; Renfrew & Bahn, 1996, pp. 187–188). Other scholars see no more than one status dimension, whether they call it “status,” “power,” or “prestige” (e.g., Leach, 1977/1954, Ryckman et al., 1972, Shils, 1970), or they make finer distinctions but nevertheless claim conceptual unity for the assembled whole (e.g., Cartwright, 1959, French & Raven, 1959). Many evolutionary scholars tend to see all human status as homologous to nonhuman dominance Barkow, 1975, Barkow, 1989, Ellis, 1995, Hill, 1984a, Hill, 1984b, even though some human status processes are absent in nonhumans. This leads to calling status “dominance” even when no force or force threat is involved (e.g., Bernhardt, 1997, Gibb, 1954).
Status can be viewed as either a hierarchy of rewards or as a hierarchy of displays — or both simultaneously. Status as rewards implies a hierarchy of privilege. High status entails greater access to desirable things, that access typically is not actively resisted by inferiors. There will be occasional fights, but not typically. If those who usually get their way have to fight for this every single time, we may speak of a tabulation of frequent winners and losers, but not of a status hierarchy. For status, properly speaking, we require a relatively stable acquiescence (begrudging or not) from the “have-nots” (Weisfeld & Beresford, 1982). This understanding is signaled in ethological behavior, such that higher status individuals — identified by the flow of benefits — are typically the receivers, rather than the givers, of deference displays.
Although nonhuman status is still poorly understood, a single process appears at least strongly predominant: agonism (aggression, intimidation, violence, etc. — that is, force or force threat) The resulting social asymmetries are referred to as “dominance hierarchies” in the ethological and behavioral ecology literatures. The privileges that accrue to dominant individuals are (1) in males, preferential reproductive access to females, food, and spaces, as well as a disproportionate amount of grooming from others; (2) in females, preferential access to food and spaces, and disproportionate grooming. Despite some controversy, the evidence suggests that dominance correlates with fitness Cowlishaw & Dunbar, 1991, Ellis, 1995. The stability of dominance is often reinforced through “reminders”: submissive behaviors (e.g., grooming, submissive displays, yielding space, etc.) from subordinate to superior, whether or not induced through intimidation by the latter.
In humans, in contrast, status and its perquisites often come from nonagonistic sources — in particular, from excellence in valued domains of activity, even without any credible claim to superior force. For example, paraplegic physicist Stephen Hawking — widely regarded as Einstein's heir, and current occupant of Newton's chair at Cambridge University — certainly enjoys very high status throughout the world. Those who, like Hawking, achieve status by excelling in valued domains are often said to have “prestige.”
In the Amazon, several researchers have observed two avenues to status and leadership in small-scale societies: “force” and “persuasion” (Krackle, 1978). “Forceful” leaders are domineering headmen who maintain their position through fear, threat, and compulsion (see also Maybury-Lewis, 1965, Maybury-Lewis, 1967). “Persuasive” leaders depend on their influence and the consent of their followers and lack the force to obligate (see also Arvelo de Jiménez, 1971, Clastres, 1998, Goldman, 1979, Huxley, 1966, Levi-Strauss, 1944). These two styles of leadership, involving either persuasion or force, correspond to our two types of status: prestige and dominance.
The evolution of the human cultural capacity — that is, for intergenerationally stable, high fidelity, social transmission — created a new selective environment in which mutations improving the reproductive benefits of such transmission were favored. Our ancestral psychology evolved (within physical and phylogenetic constraints) into an increasingly well-organized and specialized battery of biases jointly designed to extract reproductive benefit from the flow of socially transmitted information. Prestige processes emerge from this evolved social learning psychology.
Cultural transmission is adaptive because it saves learners the costs of individual learning. Once some cultural transmission capacities exist, natural selection favors improved learning efficiencies, such as abilities to identify and preferentially copy models who are likely to possess better-than-average information. Moreover, selection will favor behaviors in the learner that lead to better learning environments, e.g., gaining greater frequency and intimacy of interaction with the model, plus his/her cooperation. Copiers thus evolve to provide all sorts of benefits (i.e., “deference”) to targeted models in order to induce preferred models to grant greater access and cooperation. Such preferred models may be said to have prestige with respect to their “clients” (the copiers).
The above implies that the most skilled/knowledgeable models will, on-average, end up with the biggest and most lavish clienteles, so the size and lavishness of a given model's clientele (the prestige) provides a convenient and reliable proxy for that person's information quality. Thus, selection favors clients who initially pick their models on the basis of the current deference distribution, refining their assessments of relative model worth as information becomes available through both social and individual learning. This strategy confers a potentially dramatic adaptive savings in the start-up costs of rank-biased social learning. Finally, because high-quality information (“expertise,” “performative skills,” “wisdom,” “knowledge”) brings fitness-enhancing deferential clients, models have an extra incentive to outexcel each other.
Section snippets
What is prestige?
Since the common meaning of “prestige” corresponds closely with our posited domain of psychological and social causation, with its associated ethological displays and emergent population-level phenomena, we will stay close to the common meaning.
- prestige
1: standing or estimation in the eyes of people; weight or credit in general opinion. 2: commanding position in people's minds. syn see INFLUENCE — Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1994, p. 923)
Notice that the synonym is “influence” — not
Theories conflating prestige and dominance
Barkow, 1975, Barkow, 1989 argues that prestige is homologous to nonhuman dominance. The social rankings imposed through force and force threat in nonhumans became the rankings of merited deference that we see in human societies. Missing from Barkow's account, however, are the relevant selection pressures that would have achieved this exaptation. His attempt to supply them involves female mate choice. We sketch his model (Barkow, 1989, pp. 186–188):
Importance of male parental investment→female
The importance of social learning
Prestige is a consequence of the evolution of direct social learning capacities in the human lineage — abilities that are quite distinct, from the social learning abilities of other species Boyd & Richerson, 1985, Durham, 1991, Tomasello, 1994. For our argument, the most important difference between human and nonhuman social learning is that humans possess various forms of direct social learning, or “infocopying” that most other animals completely or almost completely lack Tomasello, 1994,
Predictions and evidence
Here we present predictions derived from the information goods theory, and the available evidence. Not all predictions below are unique to this theory but, as a group, they cannot be better accounted for by any competing model.
Conclusion
We have presented a theory for the evolution of prestige and prestige-biased cultural transmission. We have argued that prestige, in contrast to dominance, is a second avenue to human status and status-competition, which results from group living plus direct social learning capacities. From this theory, we have generated a number of testable predictions and have begun to review evidence from throughout the social sciences to substantiate them. In future work, we will test our theory by
Acknowledgements
We thank Nick Blurton-Jones for encouraging this project as it emerged from his seminar on foragers. We especially thank Robert Boyd, who carefully read several drafts and coached our project at various stages. We also got invaluable help from Natalie Smith, Martin Daly, Dan Fessler, Francisco Gil Diaz, Melanie Green, Allen Johnson, Joe Manson, Clark McCauley, Richard McElreath, Susan Perry, Pete Richerson, Joan Silk, and Margo Wilson.
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