Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole

• Dominance works by inspiring fear and other "avoidance" instincts so that low-status people try to steer clear of dominant individuals.
• Prestige, on the other hand, inspires admiration and other “approach” instincts. People actively seek out prestigious individuals and enjoy spending time around them.
• The perks of dominance are taken by force by the high-status (dominant) individual.
• The perks of prestige are given to the low-level admirer.

To understand dominance, we need to focus on high-status behaviours. To understand prestige, however, we must understand the low-status behaviour.

There are two main instincts/behaviours that make up the prestige system:

On the high-status side, we have prestige-seeking: striving to impress others. On the low-status side, we have admiration: celebrating or fawning over a prestigious individual.

 Dominant individuals expect deference from others and treat it as their natural right. Prestigious individuals, on the other hand, often make an elaborate show of humility when accepting the deference of others.

Performers bow as they're being applauded. Oscar-winners profusely thank their supporters. Lay people often blush and smile awkwardly when they're being celebrated, e.g., at a birthday party. To do otherwise — to act entitled to admiration — would risk alienating one's supporters.

• Low-status admirers are attracted to their prestigious superiors and hope to spend more time around them, and their admiration, therefore, acts as a bribe.
• Admirers, in other words, are sycophants. They pay respect to a prestigious individual in order to cultivate access to him.
• Prestigious people are above all impressive.
• We respect and admire people even when they're less skilled than we are, and when we're unlikely to learn from them.
• If admiration were motivated by a desire to learn, teachers would be among the most prestigious members of society.

The Arabian babbler is a small brown bird found in the arid brush of the Sinai Desert and the Arabian Peninsula.

It lives in small groups of 3-20 members, defending a small territory of trees and shrubs that provide much-needed safety from predators.

Babblers don’t just passively offer to help each other, they compete intensely for the privilege of doing so. They actively help one another and take risks for the benefit of the group.

• We voluntarily follow our leaders because good things tend to happen when we do; it pays to be on their team.
• Admiration and prestige-seeking, then, are teaming instincts.
• Our ancestors lived in a semi-permanent "home base" that needed to be guarded collectively.
• This is a prerequisite for the evolution of radical group-level cooperation.
• Our ancestors gravitated toward prestige status because, once we learned to use tools as weapons, the dominance system completely collapsed.
• Another possible explanation is that prestige acts as an indirect form of intimidation.