The Big Man Mechanism: how prestige fosters cooperation and creates prosocial leaders.
Anthropological evidence from diverse societies suggests that prestige-based leadership may provide a foundation for cooperation in many contexts. Here, inspired by such ethnographic observations and building on a foundation of existing research on the evolution of prestige, we develop a set of formal models to explore when an evolved prestige psychology might drive the cultural evolution of n-person cooperation, and how such a cultural evolutionary process might create novel selection pressures for genes that make prestigious individuals more prosocial. Our results reveal (i) how prestige can foster the cultural emergence of cooperation by generating correlated behavioural phenotypes, both between leaders and followers, and among followers; (ii) why, in the wake of cultural evolution, natural selection favours genes that make prestigious leaders more prosocial, but only when groups are relatively small; and (iii), why the effectiveness of status differences in generating cooperation in large groups depends on cultural transmission (and not primarily on deference or coercion). Our theoretical framework, and the specific predictions made by these models, sketch out an interdisciplinary research programme that cross-cuts anthropology, biology, psychology and economics. Some of our predictions find support from laboratory work in behavioural economics and are consistent with several real-world patterns.
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 03138, USA Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6S 1V9 Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6S 1V9 Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, 180 Dundas Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5G 1Z8 joseph.henrich@gmail.com.
Joseph
J
Henrich
Institute of Human Origins, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA.
Maciej
M
Chudek
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, 180 Dundas Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5G 1Z8 Institute of Human Origins, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA.
Robert
R
Boyd
D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D006801:Humans; D007857:Leadership; D008297:Male; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012928:Social Desirability; D012930:Social Dominance; D012931:Social Environment
cooperation; cultural evolution; prestige; prestige-biased transmission; prosociality; status