TH EDITION
EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY,
5
Chapter x
David Buss
Chapter 12
Status, Prestige, and Social
Dominance
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Emergence of Dominance Hierarchies
• Dominance hierarchy
– The fact that some individuals within a group
reliably gain greater access than others to key
resources—resources that contribute to
survival or reproduction (Cummins, 1998)
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Dominance and Status in Nonhuman
Animals
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Evolutionary Theories of Dominance,
Prestige, and Status
• An evolutionary theory of status must
– Specify the adaptive problems that are solved
by ascending status hierarchies
– Explain why individuals accept subordinate
positions within hierarchies
– Predict which tactics people will use to
negotiate hierarchies
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Evolutionary Theories of Dominance,
Prestige, and Status
• Dominance
– involves force or the threat of force
• Schoolyard bully or a mafia “made man” may
attain status through an ability to inflict physical
punishment on others
• Prestige
– “freely conferred deference”
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Prestige Signaling, Reputation, and
Leadership
• Individuals acquire prestige by displaying
high levels of competence on tasks that
groups value
• Displaying generosity by giving more than
taking
• Making personal sacrifices that signal
commitment to the group
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Prestige Signaling, Reputation, and
Leadership
• One of the keys to prestige signaling is
that others have to be aware of the signals
in order to accord prestige to an individual
• Leading and following can be viewed as
evolved strategies for solving adaptive
problems that involve group coordination
such as coalitional hunting and coalitional
defense, as well as for resolving conflicts
that arise within the group
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An Evolutionary Theory of Sex
Differences in Status Striving
• Elevated dominance and status can give
males greater sexual access along two
paths:
– Dominant men might be preferred as mates
by women
• High-status men can offer women greater
protection and increased access to resources that
can be used to help support them, and their
children, and perhaps even access to better health
care (Buss, 1994b; Hill & Hurtado, 1996)
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An Evolutionary Theory of Sex
Differences in Status Striving
• Women in polygynous societies often prefer to
share with other cowives a bounty of resources
that a high-ranking man can provide, rather than
have all of the smaller share of resources held by a
lower-ranking man (Betzig, 1986)
– Dominant men gain increased access to
women through intrasexual domination (Puts,
2010)
• Dominant men might simply take the mates of
subordinate men, leaving these low-ranking men
helpless to retaliate
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Leadership and followership: The
service-for-prestige theory
• Service-for-prestige theory of leader–
follower relations
– Leaders, according to this theory, provide key
services to followers in the form of
organizational skills, intelligence, wisdom, and
knowledge in relevant domains
– Fundamentally based on reciprocal altruism
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Status and Sexual Opportunity
• Empirical evidence supports the
evolutionary rationale for predicting a sex
difference in the strength of the motivation
to achieve high status
• All available evidence suggests that high
status in men leads directly to increased
sexual access to a larger number of
women
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Status and Sexual Opportunity
• Elevated status in women, of course, also
could confer many reproductive
advantages
• But the direct increase in sexual access
afforded men high in status suggests a
more powerful selective rationale for a
status-striving motive in men
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Are Men Higher in Status Striving?
• Men appear to score higher on attitudes
endorsing getting ahead, including those
that justify one person’s higher status
than another and one group’s dominance
over another
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Dominance Theory
• Dominance Theory
– Humans have evolved domain-specific
strategies for reasoning about social norms
involving dominance hierarchies
• These include:
– understanding aspects such as permissions (e.g., who is
allowed to mate with whom)
– obligations (e.g., who must support whom in a social
contest)
– prohibitions (e.g., who is forbidden to mate with whom)
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Dominance Theory
– These cognitive strategies will emerge prior
to, and separate from, other types of
reasoning strategies
– Selection will favor strategies that cause one
to rise in dominance, but also will favor the
evolution of subordinate strategies to subvert
the access of the dominant individual to key
resources
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Dominance Theory
• These strategies include:
–
–
–
–
deception
guile
false subordination
friendship, and manipulation, to gain access to the
resources needed for survival and reproduction
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Social Attention-Holding Theory
• Social Attention-Holding Theory
– Based in part on the concept of resourceholding potential (RHP)
• RHP refers to an evaluation that animals make
about themselves relative to other animals
regarding their relative strengths and weaknesses
– Animal might
» attack the other, especially if it perceives itself to be
superior in RHP
» flee, especially if it perceives itself to be inferior in
RHP
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Social Attention-Holding Theory
» submit—relinquishing critical resources to those
higher in RHP
– Dominance is not a property of an individual
per se, but rather is a description of the
relationship between two or more individuals
– Proposes that humans have coopted RHP for
another mode: social attention holding
potential (SAHP)
• SAHP refers to the quality and quantity of attention
others pay to a particular person
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Social Attention-Holding Theory
– According to this view, humans compete with
each other to be attended to, and valued by,
others in the group
• When group members bestow a lot of high-quality
attention on an individual, that individual rises in
status
• Ignored individuals are banished to low status
– Differences in rank, according to this theory,
stem not from differences in threat or
coercion, but from differences in attention
conferred by others
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Social Attention-Holding Theory
• Going up in rank produces two
hypothesized consequences
– Elation
– An increase in helping
• Plummeting in status has a different set of
consequences for mood and emotion:
– Onset of social anxiety
– Shame
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Social Attention-Holding Theory
– Rage
– Envy
– Depression
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Determinants of Dominance
• Verbal and Nonverbal Indicators of
Dominance
– Dominant individuals tend to
• stand at full height, often facing the group, with
hands on hips and an expanded chest
• gaze a lot, looking at others while talking
• do not smile much
• touch others
• speak in a loud and low-pitched voice
• gesture by pointing to others
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Determinants of Dominance
– Submissive individuals tend to
•
•
•
•
stand bent rather than straight
smile a lot
speak softly
listen while the other is speaking and give many
deferential head nods
• speak less than those who are higher in status
• don’t interrupt others who are speaking
• address the high-status persons in the group,
rather than the group as whole
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Determinants of Dominance
• In a busy location in Vienna, Austria, one
observer measured the pace of
pedestrians. Later, a second observer
interviewed each individual about his or
her age, body height, and socioeconomic
status
– Significant positive correlations were found
between walking speed and socioeconomic
status for men
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Determinants of Dominance
– For women, in contrast, there were no
significant positive correlations
• Size and Dominance
– People prefer their leaders to be tall
– Men who are tall believe themselves to be
more qualified to be leaders and demonstrate
a greater interest in pursuing leadership
positions than shorter men
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Determinants of Dominance
– Even with people we know personally, our
mental image of their height is exaggerated if
we know them to be high in social status
– Tall men have an advantage in being hired,
promoted, paid, and elected (Gillis, 1982)
– Tall men earn higher salaries
– In presidential elections in the twentieth
century, the taller of the two candidates won
83 percent of the time
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Determinants of Dominance
• Testosterone and Dominance
– High T levels in men might lead to dominating
behaviors that lead to high status in some
subcultures, but reciprocally, elevations in
status appear to lead to rises in T levels
(Bernhardt, 1997)
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Determinants of Dominance
• Serotonin and Dominance
– The neurotransmitter serotonin joins T as one
of the brain chemicals responsible for
mediating one’s position in the status
hierarchy
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Determinants of Dominance
• Needed: A Theory of the Determinants of
Dominance
– Lacking is a comprehensive theory that can
explain precisely what people value in others,
why they value those things, and precisely
why humans hold some people in esteem and
awe while others remain ignored or are
humiliated
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Determinants of Dominance
• Self-Esteem as a Status-Tracking
Mechanism
– Sociometer Theory
• Proposes that self-esteem functions as a
subjective indicator or gauge of other people’s
evaluations
– An increase in self-esteem signals an increase in the
degree to which one is socially included and accepted by
others
– A loss of self-esteem follows from a downward shift in the
degree to which one is included and accepted by others
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Determinants of Dominance
– Logic
• Humans evolved in groups and needed others to
survive and reproduce
• This prompted the evolution of motivations to seek
the company of others, form social bonds, and
curry the favor of others in the group
• Failure to be accepted by others would have
resulted in isolation and premature death if one
were forced to live without the protective covering
of the group
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Determinants of Dominance
• Given that social acceptance would have been
critical to survival, selection would have favored a
mechanism that enabled an individual to track the
degree of acceptance by others
• That mechanism, according to sociometer theory,
is self-esteem
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Strategies of Submissiveness
• The adaptive problems posed by being
low in status
– sex differences in submissive strategies
– deceiving down
– the downfall of “tall poppies”
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