Prestige status emerges from second-order cultural learning cues, not verified skill

Evidence

This patterning, as it emerged over human evolutionary history, created another opportunity for natural selection to sharpen our cultural learning abilities. When you are just learning a complex skill, it may often be difficult to distinguish a truly great performance from just a good one, or even a mediocre performance (e.g., playing the violin). To solve this problem, a young or naïve learner can watch other more experienced individuals to see who they pay attention to, defer to, and mimic. Our naïve learner can then use this to figure out whom they should begin learning from. … From this, prestige status is born. Individuals who receive this kind of attention, imitation, and deference are prestigious, even if they turn out not to be very knowledgeable or skilled. These cues of prestige, such as visual attention, cause learners to preferentially target their learning efforts. Individuals become increasingly prestigious as other members of their community come to believe they are worthy of respect, deference, and admiration. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 393

Categorization

• XREF: This second-order learning (learn from whom others learn from) echoes the conformist/adult-model social-learning biases framework from earlier chapters and Milgrom’s reputation-chain work in the reader’s trust literature. — connects to: Name-dropping esoteric obscurities signals competence beyond any obvious skill — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 192; Even running form is learned culturally from prestigious elders — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 264; Learners adopt causally opaque cultural practices through implicit trust in accumulated wisdom — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 376 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Prestige evolved as a second status system distinct from dominance #expands (0.88) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 48
• Conformist transmission biases learners toward adopting a population’s most frequent cultural traits. #expands (0.85) — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 23
• Mentalizing may have evolved for cultural learning rather than for social manipulation #corroborates (0.80) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 191
• Cultural learning biases explain passionate commitment to some gods but not others #exemplifies (0.74) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 354