Dawkins, R. (1989). the Selfish Gene. (2Nd Ed.). New York: Oxford University Press

Summary of:

Buss, D. M. (2007). Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. (3rd Ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

And

Dawkins, R. (1989). The Selfish Gene. (2nd Ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Summaries by Megan St. Clair and Stacey Hewitt

For Dr. Mills’ Psyc 452 class, Spring, 2009

Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

Chapter 12 Summary

Summary By Megan St. Clair

STATUS, PRESTIGE, AND SOCIAL DOMINANCE

Why would people falsify their credentials and risk exposure as frauds in order to enhance their status and social position? The answer is simple, social position is everything. Status, prestige, esteem, honor, respect, and rank are accorded differentially to individuals in all known groups. Therefore, people devote tremendous effort to avoid disrepute, dishonor, shame, humiliation, disgrace and loss of face—because all of these things could result in lower status in the social hierarchy. Studies show that status and dominance within these hierarchies form quickly, sometimes taking only one to five minutes (Fisek & Ofshe, 1970). This suggests that a strong universal human motive is status striving.

THE EMERGENCE OF DOMINANCE HIERARCHIES

Dominance hierarchies are even evident in the behavior of crickets and hens. A cricket that tends to win a lot of fights will become more aggressive and will thus continue to win fights. While a cricket that tends to loose fights will become more submissive and will thus continue to loose fights. This shows the ability of crickets to assess their own fighting ability relative to others and behave accordingly. Overtime, a dominance hierarchy emerged, whereby each cricket could be assigned a rank order, with crickets lower in the hierarchy giving in to those higher up.

Hens establish a “pecking order” where they fight frequently until each hen learns that she is either dominant or subordinate. However, both roles have advantages because both would be better off if each could determine who would win in advance and simply declare a winner without suffering the costs of fighting.

Therefore, selection will favor the evolution of these assessment abilities—psychological mechanisms that include assessment of one’s own fighting abilities relative to those of others. For humans, assessment mechanisms include the ability to enlist powerful friends, allies and kin. The primary function of each is to avoid costly confrontations when outcomes of conflict can be determined in advance. Dominant and submissive strategies both have functions for the individual, and in the aggregate, the produce a dominance hierarchy. Dominance Hierarchy refers to the fact that some individuals with a group reliably gain greater access than others to key resources that contribute to survival and reproduction.

DOMINANCE AND STATUS IN NONHUMAN ANIMALS
Dominance and status striving is also evident in the behaviors of crayfish and chimpanzees. Research has revealed that crayfish undergo changes in their nervous system as a result of winning or losing dominance. In a dominant crayfish, serotonin makes the neuron more likely to fire. In the subordinate, serotonin inhibits the neuron from firing. It is important to remember; however, that one battle doesn’t determine permanent social status. This means that a subordinate crayfish can become dominant if the circumstances change.

Chimpanzees also battle for dominance. In order to become dominant, male chimps make themselves look larger and heavier, which will cause them to receive submissive greetings from subordinate chimps. The achieved dominance status of male chimps comes with the perk of increased sexual access to females who are most likely to conceive.

These behaviors have theoretical implications. First, hierarchies are not static. Depending on the situation, a subordinate can become dominant and visa versa. Second, rising in primate hierarchies depends heavily on social skills, notably the ability to enlist allies who will support them in contests with other individuals. Increased sexual oppurtunities with females provide a powerful adaptive rationale for the evolution of dominance-striving mechanisms. It also suggests an evolutionary basis for the sex difference in the dominance-striving motive.

EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES OF DOMINANCE, PRESTIGE, AND STATUS

No complete theories of human status hierarchies have been proposed that do all of the following:

-  Specify the adaptive problems that are solved by ascending status hierarchies, as well as explain why individuals accept subordinate positions within hierarchies

-  Predict which tactics people will use to negotiate hierarchies

-  Why status-striving is more prevalent among males than females

-  Account for the behavior consigned to subordinate status

-  Explain why people often strive for equality among members of the group

-  Differentiate between dominance hierarchies (allocation of resources) and production hierarchies (coordination and division of labor for achieving group goals)

-  Should identify the different routes or paths to elevated rank or status, with dominance and prestige as the important ones.

An Evolutionary Theory of Sex Differences in Status Striving

Males and females differ dramatically in their reproductive outputs. Male reproductive success is typically much more unpredictable than female reproductive success. While they may have an abundance of sperm and minimal investment in offspring, they still have to compete for the available women to impregnate. On the other hand, all fertile females will succeed in reproducing, regardless of their social status. Therefore, males need elevated dominance and status, in order to increase their sexual access to women. This can be accomplished along two paths: (1) Dominant men might have preferential selection by women as a mate, merely because of their higher-status and accompanying ability to offer more (2) Dominant men might simply take or poach the mates of the subordinate men, leaving these low ranking men helpless to retaliate (intersexual domination).

Status and Sexual Opportunity

Is there evidence that elevated status in men actually leads to more sexual opportunities with women? One research study assembled research data from the first six civilizations that showed that kings, emperors, and despots routinely collected women in harems, choosing the young, fertile, and attractive. Even more recent genetic analyses have confirmed the effects of status, power, and position on reproductive outcomes of these kings, emperors, and despots whose genetic results can be linked to an abundance of offspring. This linkage appears to hold in modern times as well, despite the changes in time and the movement toward monogamy. Men greater in social status gain greater access to a larger number of women, (even if married) through short-term sex partners or extramarital affairs. High-status males also have more frequent sex and a larger number of children. Furthermore, high-status men are able to marry females who are considerably more physically attractive, as well as women who are younger and more fertile. Thus, despite modern day changes in sexual affiliation, the link between a man’s status and sexual access to young, attractive women has remained the same. This suggests a sex difference in the strength of the motivation to achieve high status, whereby men are considered to have a more powerful selective rationale for a status-striving motive because it increases sexual access to women.

Are Men Higher in Status Striving?

Research findings support the evolutionary theory that there is a sex difference in motivation to gain dominance or status. Studies have shown that young boys immediately issue dominance challenges to their peers, whereas, girls tend to display nurturance and pleasing sociability. Furthermore, research on social dominance orientation (SDO) revealed that those who were high on this orientation should be higher in men than in women because such an orientation led ancestral men to greater control of, and access to women. In addition, women would have been selected to choose men high in SDO, since this would offer them and their children more benefits. Also, men consistently score higher than women on SDO scales. In sum, men appear to score higher on attitudes endorsing getting ahead, including those that justify one person’s status than another and one group’s dominance over another.

Men and Women Express Their Dominance Through Different Actions

Another source of evidence for a sex difference in dominance comes from the acts through which men and women express their dominance. One study listed 100 acts mentioned as dominant. Profound sex differences emerged. Women more then men tended to rate prosocial dominant acts as more socially desirable, while men tended to rate more egoistic dominant acts as more socially desirable. In other words, men tend to perform acts in which others are influenced for the direct personal benefit of the dominant individuals. While, women appear to express their dominance primarily through actions that facilitate group-functioning and well-being.

Another researcher, Megargee, examined the effect of dominance on leadership among four groups: (1) high dominant man with low dominant man, (2) high dominant woman with low dominant woman, (3) a high dominant man with a low dominant woman, and (4) a high dominant woman with a low-dominant man. Megargee wanted to find who would become the leader and who would become the follower. He found that 75% of the high dominant men and 70% of the high dominant women took the leadership role in same-sex pairs. When high dominant men were paired with low dominant women; however, 90% of the men became leaders. When the woman was high and the man low, only 20% of the high dominant women assumed the leadership role. These results show that women express their dominance in a different manner than the men in the mixed-sex condition. In sum, the study highlights a key sex difference: Men tend to express their dominance through acts of personal ascension whereby they elevate themselves to positions of power and status. While women tend to be less oriented toward personal striving for status over others, opting instead to express their dominance for group-oriented goals.

Dominance Theory
Dominance theory was developed by Denise Cummins who started with the proposal that the struggle for survival in human groups was often characterized by conflicts between those who were dominant and those who were trying to outwit those who were dominant. Selection will favor strategies that cause one to rise in dominance but also will favor the evolution of subordinate strategies to subvert access of the dominant individual to key resources needed for survival and reproduction.

This theory has two propositions: (1) Humans have evolved domain-specific strategies for reasoning about social norms involving dominance hierarchies. These include understanding aspects such as permissions, obligations, and prohibitions. (2) These cognitive strategies will emerge prior to, and separate from, other types of reasoning strategies.

Evidence that supports the propositions made by this theory are summarized below: (1) Children as young as age three appear to reason about dominance hierarchies, including the property of transitivity; (2) people tend to remember the faces of cheaters more if the cheaters are lower in status than if they are higher in status; and (3) people tend to look for violations of rules among lower-status individuals when they are asked to assume the perspective of a higher-status individual.

Social Attention Holding Theory

Paul Gilbert introduces another theory that emphasizes the emotional components of dominance. His theory is partly based on Resource-Holding Potential, which refers to an evaluation that animals make about themselves relative to other animals regarding their relative strengths and weaknesses. The behaviors that follow from these relative assessments give rise to dominance hierarchies. Three types of behaviors may follow in response to another individual: (1) attack, (2) flee, or (3) submit.

Humans have adopted a similar mode called social attention-holding potential (SAHP). This revolves around the quality and quantity of attention directed at an individual. In this regard, humans are thought to compete with each other, to be attended to, and valued by, others in the group. Differences in rank, therefore, result from the differences in attention—those high in attention have high status, and those low in attention have lower status, respectively. In addition, Gilbert suggests that humans bestow attention to those who perform a function that is valued by the bestowers. People compete to bestow benefits on others, in this view, to rise in SAHP.

Gilbert’s most novel theoretical contribution comes from hypotheses about the role of moor or emotion as a consequence of respective changes in rank. An increase in rank produces two emotional consequences: elation and an increase in helping others. Meanwhile, a decrease in rank produces a different set of consequences for mood and emotion—the onset of social anxiety (which occurs in situations where there is the possibility of gaining or losing of status), shame and rage (as a response to status loss), envy (as a form of retaliation to motivate the acquisition of what others have), and depression (to facilitate submissive posturing to avoid further attacks from superiors). In sum, this theory proposes that many aspects of human emotional life are evolved features of psychological mechanisms designed to deal with the adaptive problems of status hierarchies.

Determinants of Dominance

A variety of verbal and nonverbal characteristics signal high dominance and status. These range from time spent talking to testosterone. Correlation between dominance and status were found; however, it is important to remember that causation cannot be inferred.

Verbal and Nonverbal Indicators of Dominance

One researcher found that dominant individuals tend to stand tall, face their group, place hands on hips, expand their chests, smiling is minimal, they touch others, and speak in a loud and low-pitched voice. Whereas, behaviors of low-ranking or submissive individuals is typically the opposite: their posture is bent, they frequently smile, speak softly, look while the other is speaking, they don’t interrupt others, and they address the high-status group members rather than the group as a whole.

A separate study predicted a link between walking pace and status that would only occur for men and not for women. This is because males overtime have had to compete for females by impressing them with signs of their hunting skills, including locomotory speed and perseverance. This study proved the hypothesis, yielding a significant correlation between walking speed and socioeconomic status for men but not for women.

Size and Dominance

Sheer size remains an important factor. The term “big man” has a dual meaning in most cultures, referring to both a man of large physical stature and a man of importance, influence, power, and authority. This comes together in the human tendency for rank or social stature to correlate with physical stature. People have a preference for leaders who are tall. This is shown in a study where audiences described a man said to be high in status as taller than when the same man was said to be low in status. In the United States, tall men also have an advantage in being hired, promoted, paid, and elected.