An Experimental Simulation of the Cultural Transmission of Prestige and Dominance Social Rank Cues
Informal social hierarchies within small human groups are argued to be based on prestige, dominance, or a combination of these two (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). Prestige-based hierarchies entail the ordering of individuals by the level of admiration and respect they receive from others due to their competence within valued domains. This type of hierarchy provides benefits for subordinates such as high-quality social learning opportunities and both private and public goods. In contrast, dominance-based hierarchies entail the ordering of individuals by their capacity to win fights, coerce and intimidate others. This type of hierarchy produces costs in subordinates due to its aggressive and intimidating nature. Given the benefits and costs associated with these types of social hierarchies for subordinates, we hypothesized that prestige and dominance cues are better recalled and transmitted than social rank cues that do not elicit high prestige or dominance associations (here medium social rank cues). Assuming that for the majority of the population who are not already at the top of the social hierarchy it is more important to avoid the costs of dominance-based hierarchies than to obtain the benefits of prestige-based hierarchies, we hypothesized that dominance cues are better transmitted than prestige cues. We conducted a recall-based transmission chain experiment with 30 chains of four generations each (N=120). Participants read and recalled three descriptions of prestigious, dominant and medium social rank footballers, and their recall was then passed to the next participant within their chain. As predicted, we found that both prestige cues and dominance cues were better transmitted than medium social rank cues. However, we did not find support for our prediction of the better transmission of dominance cues over prestige cues. We discuss whether the results might be explain by a specific social-rank content transmission bias or by a more general emotional content transmission bias.