Prestige and dominance are distinct social statuses with separable reproductive effects

Evidence

Unfortunately, there’s very little work linking prestige and dominance to measures of fitness, in part because evolutionary researchers have typically assumed that humans have only one dimension of social status. However, Chris von Rueden and his colleagues have recently studied prestige and dominance among the Tsimané in the Bolivian Amazon as part of a long-term field project. The Tsimané live in relatively independent small family groups that are now clustered in villages along rivers. … Chris asked a sample of Tsimané to rank the men in two villages along a number of dimensions, including their fighting ability, generosity, respect, community persuasiveness, ability to get their way, and their number of allies. Each Tsimané man could then be assigned a score based on the aggregate results from his fellow villagers. Chris argued that his measures of fighting ability and community persuasiveness provide the best proxies for dominance and prestige, respectively, in this context. He then showed that both of these proxies for social status are associated with having more babies with one’s wife, having more extramarital affairs, and being more likely to remarry after a divorce, even after statistically removing the effects of age, kin group size, economic productivity, and several other factors. … Beyond this, the children of prestigious men die less frequently, and prestigious men are more likely to marry at younger ages (neither of these effects held for dominant men). These findings suggest that, at least in this small-scale society, being recognized as either dominant or prestigious has a positive influence on one’s total reproductive output (children) or mating success, over and above the consequences that might accrue from factors associated with status, like economic productivity or hunting skills. Not surprisingly, both dominant and prestigious men tended to get their way at group meetings, but only prestigious men were respected and generous. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 398

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s coercion-vulnerability framework: the distinction between prestige (freely conferred, others copy you) and dominance (enforced) maps onto whether influence is voluntarily adopted or coerced — ties to his social-learning-bias analysis. — connects to: Prestige grants influence far beyond the domain of skill — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 388; Prestige-based influence emerges independently across egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 390; Prestige evolved as a second status system distinct from dominance — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 48 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Prestige evolved as a second status system distinct from dominance #corroborates (0.95) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 48
• Animal dominance hierarchies poorly model human status structures #qualifies (0.78) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 62
• Masochistic submission depends on the lover’s maintained prestige #exemplifies (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1863