Prestige or Dominate

Monday, May 26, 2025

Prestige or Dominate

Throughout the animal kingdom, sociable species have inborn sets of rules for interacting with each other. These rules help determine which ones get preferred access to the scarce resources of food, water, and mating opportunities. In the main, the rules have to do with the competitive assertion of dominance over others, of playing a constant game of King of the Hill.

Joseph Henrich describes human evolution as having taken a unique turn by coopting culture. Cultural-genetic co-evolution in Homo sapiens has added a distinct form of hierarchy to the ancient one of social dominance: prestige. Whereas dominance is asserted by establishing superior strength and force of will, prestige relies on others in society recognizing traits of talent and expertise worthy of mimicking.

Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success discusses studies which found human children rated an adult based on observable competence or incompetence. The children followed models that looked obviously competent, even when the competent models demonstrated extraneous actions to complete a task. The experiments indicated that this quirk distinguishes our kind from our nearest hominid relatives: We learn details of tasks without being able to explain why. But the Why has to do with the fact that cultural practices are learned over multiple generations, often obscuring causality.

That is, some person or people in a culture learn a new skill, perhaps the skill of making fire by a complex series of actions to generate heat and sparks from a mechanism for rubbing two sticks together, let’s say by the action of a drill motion driving a short twig into a flat piece of wood. Lots of trial and error over generations perfects this skill and refines it to specify the exact types of wood to use, the precise type of twig for the drill, the particular fibers to make the winding twine on the bow portion. By the time these details have been handed down, at the latest, those who learn the skill may not know that one species of twig has the best properties for the job. Instead, they are just as likely just to think that detail has to do with the culture’s religious practices, or it’s just an important part of their cultural identity, and thus a meaningful bit of tradition.

As another example, New World indigenous populations knew from hundreds of generations of practice that the agricultural plant maize (which their ancestors had tamed) required a complex set of steps in preparation to make it edible. That is, maize that is ground into flour and cooked will—over time—cause severe nutrient deficiencies unless augmented with an alkaline (basic, high pH) substance. Failure to perform this treatment is essential for preventing pellagra.

The treatment of maize is non-obvious. It is the type of detail that culture learns over many generations, by the experimentation of individuals over time. Non-obvious cultural information is passed on because we are capable of copying the details of actions beyond what is apparent. Because the agricultural technology of maize was transmitted to Europe without the treatment practices—which appeared to be nonsensical extraneous steps—over time the populations who initially benefited from the extra calories soon began to succumb to this apparent disease of an unknown source. No one knew about pellagra or vitamin deficiency. It exhibited as just some new disease caused by Lord knows what.

In native Indian cultures, expert farmers and food preparers had passed along the necessary practices as skills. Those who learned those skills for farming and food preparation learned the practices from members of their society who they recognized as expert, as worthy of prestige. It wasn’t passed down and adopted because of displays of aggression and demands for fealty—the program of asserting dominance. It was displays of skill, in part of becoming an elder, thereby demonstrating the skill to survive over time.

Our species has the inborn ability to copy, to learn even extraneous-looking details from one another. Our species is capable of passing down cultural learning even absent any causal explanations for copying faithfully in such detail. In pre-historic societies without writing systems, skills were passed down over centuries and millennia because they helped cultures survive and thrive, outcompeting rivals without the benefits of such cultural learnings. If someone had asked them Why they performed these details of what became an essential skill, they are likely to have said it had to do with the importance of their rituals and traditions that connected them to their own ancestors. They could not have told you it was because of chemical reactions unleashed by a certain order of steps in processing a food to neutralize its anti-nutrient properties. They would have said it was because it’s what mom or grandma always did, and they got it from their mothers and grandmothers, and so on.

Children in studies have shown a tendency to understand prestige: They copy adults who show they are otherwise competent over adults who behave in ways that are apparently foolish. An unintended consequence of this at times is that we may assume individuals who demonstrate competence in one field are equally competent in unrelated fields. This aspect is how people can become famous for being famous, the Paris Hilton Effect. Someone who has the skills to become a celebrity, our minds suggest to us, certainly has skills worth paying close attention to, and may be worth copying in other unrelated domains. Our minds tell us, “This person is a celebrity, she’s famous and influential. She must therefore have superior skills and knowledge. She must be worth paying attention to. Her opinions must have intrinsic value.” And advertisers will be willing to pay her a lot to endorse their retail brands or auto insurance policies.

For the sake of the research discussion, prestige is not assessed in terms of whether or not the person accorded it is truly deserving, but merely that this person is viewed as prestigious. Nevertheless, prestige as a form of social hierarchy is of a completely different nature as dominance, which the dominant individual has to impose on others by threat of force. Prestige is an item of genetic-cultural co-evolution, as Henrich argues, that truly sets us apart from the other creatures on earth.