Dominance in humans. Tian Chen Zeng, Joey T. Cheng and Joseph Henrich. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, January 10 2022. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0451
Abstract: Dominance captures behavioural patterns found in social hierarchies that arise from agonistic interactions in which some individuals coercively exploit their control over costs and benefits to extract deference from others, often through aggression, threats and/or intimidation. Accumulating evidence points to its importance in humans and its separation from prestige—an alternate avenue to high status in which status arises from information (e.g. knowledge, skill, etc.) or other non-rival goods. In this review, we provide an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of dominance as a concept within evolutionary biology, discuss the challenges of applying it to humans and consider alternative theoretical accounts which assert that dominance is relevant to understanding status in humans. We then review empirical evidence for its continued importance in human groups, including the effects of dominance—independently of prestige—on measurable outcomes such as social influence and reproductive fitness, evidence for specialized dominance psychology, and evidence for gender-specific effects. Finally, because human-specific factors such as norms and coalitions may place bounds on purely coercive status-attainment strategies, we end by considering key situations and contexts that increase the likelihood for dominance status to coexist alongside prestige status within the same individual, including how: (i) institutional power and authority tend to elicit dominance; (ii) dominance-enhancing traits can at times generate benefits for others (prestige); and (iii) certain dominance cues and ethology may lead to mis-attributions of prestige.
5. Discussion
The evidence reviewed above indicates that dominance continues to be a viable route to rank acquisition, impacting both social influence and fitness in humans across a wide range of contexts, and plays a role in human status asymmetries from the youngest of ages. However, the human-specific complications presented in this review cannot be overlooked. First, we comment on some important methodological and theoretical issues with research programmes that attempt to measure dominance in our species. Second, we look into gender-specific effects of dominant strategies for rank acquisition. Also finally, because norms may place bounds on the effectiveness of coercion-based strategies to rank attainment or even modify their function, we lay out the evidence for three social dynamics that influence dominance attainment and their interaction with prestige, and use concepts previously developed to consider how socioecological and institutional factors affect when and how dominant individuals can attain influence.
(a) Theoretical and methodological challenges
Because dominance produces status or influence over others' actions that is achieved against anothers' preferences, survey measures that tap the colloquial understanding of ‘social influence’ or ‘status' or that rely on the definition of status in social psychology (which involves gaining deference through changing another's preferences; [51]) may fail to capture the full impact of dominance. Indeed, a recent high-profile analysis of questionnaire responses [3] found across a range of large-scale societies, that people rated dominant traits (defined by ‘cost-infliction inclinations and abilities') to have weak or no impact on social influence after controlling for prestigious traits (benefit-provisioning inclinations and abilities). However, in several follow-up studies, Cheng et al. [147] demonstrated that the descriptors of the dependent variable (social influence) in the study strongly activated prestige-related concepts, which would make ‘prestige' appear more important in the results. Translations often magnified this problem by using synonyms for ‘reputation' and sometimes ‘prestige’ itself in the target language for the dependent variable. Additionally, the analyses suffered from high collinearity between dominance and prestige, which rendered any firm conclusions inappropriate. However, reanalyses designed to address this issue revealed an important role for dominance, albeit less than for prestige—which is not unexpected given the translation process and the semantics of words used for the dependent variable. For the reasons we have described, prestige may often be more important than dominance in many contexts, but as we have reviewed, dominance continues to play an important role.
Studies of non-human primates use multiple measures of dominance, such as resource control after competitive bouts, or directionality of aggression and formal dominance signals. These measures usually correlate, but not always, leading to doubts about construct validity in some species [148]. Nevertheless, recent research in humans that treats dominance as a trait reflecting stable individual differences in ability and tendency to use force-based strategies for rank pursuit [49] generally finds very high inter-rater correlations of subject's dominance (approx. 78–0.88 in [49]; greater than 0.8 in [51]), and Cronbach's alpha (0.83 in [56]; 0.83–0.93 in [51]; 0.86 in [115]), indicating that naturalistic groups reach near-consensus on a dominance construct that demonstrates excellent validity according to standard psychological criteria. Empirically, measured dominance and prestige tend to be uncorrelated (r = 0.03–0.12 in [49]; r = 0.01 in [51] r = −0.12–0.17 in [117]) or negatively correlated (e.g. [129]), which means that the high level of collinearity that people believe exists between prestige and dominance in [3] may not be empirically reflected in naturalistic groups in the laboratory or the field. An older tradition in the measurement of dominance inspired by primate ethology uses purely relational measures (such as the direction of unreciprocated agonistic behaviours) to measure dominance as an emergent phenomenon specific to a group, which is closer to the theoretical foundations of dominance as a concept. When used together with survey-assessed trait dominance, relational and trait dominance strongly correlate, regardless of whether the survey is filled by observers or by group participants [12]. Overall, the evidence points to the importance of avoiding self-report measures in favour of integrating both other-report measures and ethological observations to produce secure measurements of the dominance construct.
(b) Gender-specific effects
Current research supports the view that dominance plays a role in status attainment for both men and women in same and mixed-gender contexts [51,64,115,117,118]. However, evidence exists for gender-specificity in the way dominance impacts social status. For example, in a study of status among same-sex face-to-face groups in Canada [51], women perceived as dominant were deemed less likeable by other women (r = −0.24, p = 0.025), whereas dominant men incurred little to no social penalty (r = 0.08, p = 0.43). Among the egalitarian Chabu in Ethiopia, dominance contributed less to leadership attainment among women than among men [55].
One potential explanation for this comes from social role theory [149]: women's lower status across societies results from social norms emphasizing that women ought to be communal—warm, nurturing, kind—while men should strive to be agentic—assertive, authoritative and independent [150–152]. A proclivity to sanction gender norm violations [153,154] may result in backlash against women who exercise dominance, who are often described by scholars as overly agentic relative to norm expectations [155–158]. Backlash occurs even when dominant women seek to lead groups with communal and other-serving (stereotypically feminine) goals [159], and among same-sex sanctioners [160]. Alternatively, because men and women may have tended to solve problems in different social domains over evolutionary history, dominance may be a more socially valued trait in men than in women for both cultural and biological reasons [161]—a hypothesis that may be tested with further cross-cultural research.
(c) The social dynamics of prestige and dominance
While prestige and dominance coexist as pathways to status in humans, they need not operate independently. Many high-status individuals may derive influence from both prestige and dominance processes. This is especially important given the factors reviewed that limit the effectiveness of coercive tactics alone. Alongside the more straightforward process where subordinates are compelled into compliance exclusively via coercive threats, three mechanisms may produce an overlap between dominance and prestige status components.
First, culturally evolved institutional hierarchies may grant formal leaders, managers and other authorities power through control over rewards and punishments, which creates the conditions for dominance via coercive threats; institutionally powerful individuals tend to resort to dominant social tactics especially when prestige is lost [162]. Because such positions may in some societies be attained (or be assumed to be attained) through skill, competence or knowledge, high-status authorities may demonstrate prestige ethology even as they keep aggressive or coercive tactics in their toolboxes for use in limited occasions. Such roles may exist even in egalitarian societies, for example among shamans, who tend to be simultaneously respected and feared [56,163].
Second, traits, attributes and motivations that generate coercive threat may themselves constitute valued abilities worthy of emulation or deference in some situations. Physically formidable men may be seen as more capable of generating benefits for in-group members through their perceived capacity to punish free-riders, to facilitate inter-group competition [134,164,165] or to compel broader coalitional support from others [1,52].
Third, displays of confidence, which are frequent among dominant individuals [166] can lead to an undeserved prestigious reputation relative to their true skill. This will depend on the quality of information on other's skill levels, meaning that this mechanism is more likely to operate in complex large-scale societies with high levels of specialization and where ephemeral interactions with strangers are important.
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