Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy [and Comments and Reply]

Boehm, Christopher; Barclay, Harold Β.; Dentan, Robert Knox; Dupré, Marie-Claude; Hill, Jonathan D.; Kent, Susan; Knauft, Bruce M.; Otterbein, Keith F.; Rayner, Steve

doi:10.1086/204166

Cited by 570 publications

(366 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…In almost all social situations, humans readily develop hierarchically structured relationships, with some individuals exerting more influence on others and, consequently, attaining increased access to reproductively relevant resources (e.g., food, mates; Berger, Rosenholtz, & Zelditch, 1980). Indeed, individual differences in social status or rank may be ubiquitous in human social interactions (Boehm, 1993). Many other primates also form strong social hierarchies, and gaze following has been documented in several of these, such as monkeys (Emery, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

et al. 2010

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a b s t r a c tHuman visual attention operates in a context that is complex, social and dynamic. To explore this, we recorded people taking part in a group decision-making task and then showed video clips of these situations to new participants while tracking their eye movements. Observers spent the majority of time looking at the people in the videos, and in particular at their eyes and faces. The social status of the people in the clips had been rated by their peers in the group task, and this status hierarchy strongly predicted where eyetracker participants looked: high-status individuals were gazed at much more often, and for longer, than low-status individuals, even over short, 20-s videos. Fixation was temporally coupled to the person who was talking at any one time, but this did not account for the effect of social status on attention. These results are consistent with a gaze system that is attuned to the presence of other individuals, to their social status within a group, and to the information most useful for social interaction.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

et al. 2010

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“…In such a setting, complex social interactions mitigate the risk of strict authoritarian social hierarchies emerging [30] that can lead to an unequal distribution of a group's resources. During the Late Pleistocene, all humans lived in such hunter-gatherer societies, this mode of life having emerged at least hundreds of thousands of years earlier and played an important role in human social and cultural development [29,31,32].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The social brain: scale-invariant layering of Erdős–Rényi networks in small-scale human societies

Harré

Prokopenko

2016

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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The cognitive ability to form social links that can bind individuals together into large cooperative groups for safety and resource sharing was a key development in human evolutionary and social history. The 'social brain hypothesis' argues that the size of these social groups is based on a neurologically constrained capacity for maintaining long-term stable relationships. No model to date has been able to combine a specific socio-cognitive mechanism with the discrete scale invariance observed in ethnographic studies. We show that these properties result in nested layers of self-organizing Erdó´s-Rényi networks formed by each individual's ability to maintain only a small number of social links. Each set of links plays a specific role in the formation of different social groups. The scale invariance in our model is distinct from previous 'scale-free networks' studied using much larger social groups; here, the scale invariance is in the relationship between group sizes, rather than in the link degree distribution. We also compare our model with a dominance-based hierarchy and conclude that humans were probably egalitarian in hunter -gatherer-like societies, maintaining an average maximum of four or five social links connecting all members in a largest social network of around 132 people.

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“…Whilst a logical and moralistic approach to social interactions may not lead to fluid conversations, pleasing comments or a natural ability to put others at ease, a tendency to be whistle-blowers, and to counteract aggressive behaviour through adherence to moral principles, gives individuals with AS a certain respect in a collaborative social context. A willingness to police cheats and counteract dominance is highly regarded in hunter-gatherer contexts (Boehm et al 1993). Likewise in modern contexts individuals with AS are often drawn to careers in law (Rodman 2003;Fitzgerald and O'Brien 2007) and in past contexts to the imposition of social norms and rules.…”

Section: Autism Without Intellectual Impairment Is Associated With Vamentioning

confidence: 99%

Are there alternative adaptive strategies to human pro-sociality? The role of collaborative morality in the emergence of personality variation and autistic traits

2016

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Selection pressures to better understand others' thoughts and feelings are seen as a primary driving force in human cognitive evolution. Yet might the evolution of social cognition be more complex than we assume, with more than one strategy towards social understanding and developing a positive pro-social reputation? Here we argue that social buffering of vulnerabilities through the emergence of collaborative morality will have opened new niches for adaptive cognitive strategies and widened personality variation. Such strategies include those that that do not depend on astute social perception or abilities to think recursively about others' thoughts and feelings. We particularly consider how a perceptual style based on logic and detail, bringing certain enhanced technical and social abilities which compensate for deficits in complex social understanding could be advantageous at low levels in certain ecological and cultural contexts. 'Traits of autism' may have promoted innovation in archaeological material culture during the late Palaeolithic in the context of the mutual interdependence of different social strategies, which in turn contributed to the rise of innovation and large scale social networks. ARTICLE HISTORY

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Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy [and Comments and Reply]

Cited by 570 publications

References 55 publications

Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

The social brain: scale-invariant layering of Erdős–Rényi networks in small-scale human societies

Are there alternative adaptive strategies to human pro-sociality? The role of collaborative morality in the emergence of personality variation and autistic traits

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