Human prestige psychology can promote adaptive inequality in social influence

Abstract

Abstract Human hunter-gatherer groups were commonly thought to be broadly egalitarian, with increasingly formal hierarchical social structures hypothesized to spread following the introduction of agriculture. However, this view is being challenged by mounting evidence for social hierarchies in several foraging populations. Nonetheless, the processes by which such hierarchies emerge, and whether human hierarchies are homologous with non-human systems of dominance, remains unclear. Here we examine the role of prestige, the tendency to freely confer status and influence on skilled or esteemed individuals and a proposed component of human-unique cultural psychology, in generating unequal patterns of social influence. Through a combination of cultural evolutionary modelling, human experimentation, and evolutionary simulations, we find that human prestige psychology generates highly unequal influence hierarchies, and that the “prestige sensitivity” we measure empirically in human participants closely matches the predictions of our evolutionary simulations, suggesting it is an evolved psychological adaptation. Nonetheless, unlike non-human dominance hierarchies, the processes involved are non-coercive, being driven by individuals freely seeking high quality information. We thus conclude that social hierarchies plausibly have a deep evolutionary history in our lineage, with prestige enabling hierarchies to be mutually beneficial as opposed to coercive.