Testing An Evo Psych Theory Outside Of The Lab: Prestige And Dominance-Based Social Hierarchies Emerge Even Amongst Cornish Choirs And Chess Clubs

By Matthew Warren Psychologists have noticed that aspiring leaders generally pursue one of two different approaches for getting to the top of the social food-chain. Some people exert influence by building up skills or knowledge that command respect and deference from their peers – known as the prestige strategy. Others prefer to rule by fear instead, forcing others to fall into line – the dominance strategy. This dichotomy has even been suggested to account for the vastly different leadership styles of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.  But many of the studies that have looked at the dynamics of prestige and dominance have done so in artificial social situations, examining groups of strangers brought together for a short time in the lab. So in a new study published in Royal Society Open Science, Charlotte Brand and Alex Mesoudi went out into the world and looked at how hierarchies based on prestige and dominance affected the behaviour of real social groups.  The researchers recruited 30 community groups from Cornwall, each made up of 5 individuals and ranging from choirs to chess clubs (my favourites include a band known as Falmouth Fish Sea Shanty Collective, and a group of board game creators called Pirates of Penryn). Each participant completed a 40-item quiz covering topics like art and geography, first individually and then together with their group. The groups were told they had to come to an agreement on each answer, and the group that scored the highest overall ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: evolutionary psych Social Source Type: blogs