Looming large in others' eyes: racial stereotypes illuminate dual adaptations for representing threat versus prestige as physical size

Abstract

We hypothesize that, paralleling the evolution of human hierarchies from social structures based on dominance to those based on prestige, adaptations for representing status are derived from those for representing relative fighting capacity. Because both violence and status are important adaptive challenges, the mind contains the ancestral representational system as well as the derived system. When the two representational tasks conflict, owing to the exigent nature of potential violence, the former should take precedence over the latter. Indeed, separate literatures indicate that, despite the fact that threatening traits are generally deleterious to prestige, both threatening individuals and high-status individuals are conceptually represented as physically large. We investigated the interplay between size-based representations of threat versus prestige by examining racial danger stereotypes. In three studies, we demonstrate that (a) judgments of status only positively correlate with envisioned body size for members of groups stereotyped as safe, (b) group-based inferences of interpersonal threat are mediated by representations of physical size, (c) controlling for perceived threatening aggressiveness reduces or reverses non-positive correlations between status and size, and (d) individuating information about relative threat or status attenuates the influence of group danger stereotypes. These results support our proposal that ancestral threat-representation mechanisms and derived mechanisms for representing social rank coexist -and sometimes compete -in the mind.Keywords: intergroup bias; prejudice; formidability; status; threat detection 3 IntroductionAll social species exhibit hierarchies in which position is a determinant of fitness.Selection can therefore be expected to have crafted mechanisms that enhance decision-making in hierarchical interactions. Nonhuman social hierarchies are principally based on dominance, the supplanting of rivals through force or the threat of force. In contrast, while violence plays a role in some human interactions, many human hierarchies are built on prestige, deference granted by admirers to those whom they esteem (Barkow, 1975(Barkow, , 1989Henrich & Gil-White, 2001).Although there is debate over the extent to which some non-human primates also display elements of prestige-based status (Chapais, 2015), humans are undoubtedly unique in the extent to which prestige eclipses dominance as the foundation of social rank. Natural selection operates through the modification of existing features. Given that dominance is the ancestral basis of social organization while prestige is the derived basis, it is likely that prestige-representing adaptations were derived from dominance-representing adaptations. Because existing design often constrains the range of subsequent possibilities, derived adaptations frequently share a mix of conserved ancestral components in addition to novel features (Marcus, 2008). This suggests that the mechanisms used in reasoning about prestige-based f...

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