What is a reverse dominance hierarchy?
How small foraging bands hold their members level, what a population model and a conversation study add, and where the same check shows up in self-promotion today.
Answer to the question
What is a reverse dominance hierarchy?
A reverse dominance hierarchy is the pattern, described by Christopher Boehm, in which the members of a small band act together to hold down anyone who tries to dominate them. Gossip, teasing and shared sanction keep power spread across the group, and echoes of the same check appear today when self-promotion meets a cool audience.
Key takeaways
- Christopher Boehm's reverse dominance hierarchy describes a small band whose members act together to hold down anyone who would dominate them, as reported in The Elephant in the Brain.
- A comparison of 174 Ju/'hoan conversations found day talk centred on economic matters and gossip, and night talk on songs, dances and stories (Wiessner, 2014).
- In a population model of self-centred individuals, egalitarianism emerged once gossip allowed coalitions against dominant individuals (Calmettes and Weiss, 2017).
- In three experiments, people overestimated how pleased listeners would be by self-promotion and underestimated how annoyed they would be (Scopelliti, Loewenstein and Vosgerau, 2015).
An anthropologist sat with Ju/'hoan families and logged what was said, some of it in the heat of the day and some beside the fire at night. By day the talk turned to food, work and gossip. After dark it turned to songs, dances and stories that carried shared rules. One half kept watch on behaviour and the other put the day's friction aside, which is how a reverse dominance hierarchy can run a small society with no single chief.
A reverse dominance hierarchy turns rank upside down
The Elephant in the Brain, by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, carries the anthropologist Christopher Boehm's account of forager equality into a book about the motives we do not state. In that account a small band is not free of rank. It has a rank turned upside down. The many act together to hold down anyone who would otherwise dominate them, and the name for the arrangement is a reverse dominance hierarchy. Boasting, bossiness and eager claims to authority are watched for, and the group answers them in three steps, from the cheapest to the dearest.
- Jokes that shrink the claim.
- Withheld attention.
- Shared sanction, if it must.
The book also explains how the many could win. Deadly weapons let several people, acting together, restrain a strong individual at a risk they could bear. Once that was possible, being the biggest stopped being the surest way to the top, and getting along with the group became part of getting ahead. The authors place our modern feelings about status in that setting, which is why a person who talks up their own importance can still sense a cooler room. A reverse dominance hierarchy is old, and its instincts are still in the room.
The picture rests on a limited number of living foraging groups, and anthropologists still discuss how widely it held in the distant past. As a model of how a small, face-to-face group keeps its members level, it is clear and testable, and the studies below look at the parts of a reverse dominance hierarchy that can be tested.
Gossip is how a small band keeps equality
Polly Wiessner's comparison of day and night talk, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, rests on 174 conversations together with 68 translated texts. Day talk centred on economic matters and gossip. Night talk moved to singing, dancing, ceremonies and stories that show how institutions work and build trust across regional networks. Firelight gave the community time for social life without taking time from subsistence work, and the evening gatherings steered away from the tensions of the day.
Gossip is the low-cost end of a reverse dominance hierarchy. It needs no weapon and no meeting. Anyone can pass on a remark about a person who acts too big, and the remark spreads through the camp. Behind it lies Coalition Enforcement, a group willing to act together, and The Meta-Norm keeps the group acting, because those who fail to join in the levelling can themselves be marked.
Guillaume Calmettes and James Weiss asked whether equality needs generous people at all. Their 2017 paper in Heliyon builds a population model in which every individual is self-centred, with a wish to dominate and a dislike of being dominated. In the model, egalitarianism emerged on its own once language, and gossip in particular, allowed coalitions against dominant individuals. The result was a stable reverse dominance hierarchy, a sharing of power without any altruistic trait in the model. It is a simulation, not a field record, and it is best read as showing what is sufficient, namely a shared dislike of being ruled and a way to talk about it.
Self-promotion meets the same check today
The levelling reflex of a reverse dominance hierarchy did not stay in the camp. Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein and Joachim Vosgerau studied self-promotion in a paper in Psychological Science in 2015. People promote themselves because they want others to think well of them, but they misjudge the audience. They overestimate how proud or happy listeners will feel and underestimate how annoyed listeners will be, a result from the first two experiments. Because people tend to over-promote when they try to impress, the effort often backfires, and in the third experiment the targets saw the self-promoters as less likeable braggarts.
The listener's quiet cooling toward a person who announces a win is the modern cousin of a band's teasing of a boaster. A display is trusted when it is hard to fake and doubted when it is cheap, the logic behind What is costly signalling, and boasting is the cheapest display there is, so audiences tend to discount it. Understatement can carry rank in turn, much as a small mark does in Why We Read Quiet Logos as Status.
Our view is that the reflex behind a levelling hierarchy polices claims to superiority and welcomes contributions to the group. Online, where an audience can see a boast and reply within seconds, the chorus of replies can look a lot like the camp, and the pull toward the norm is the one Why do people conform describes, which is why news framed as a contribution lands differently there from news framed as a win.
Common questions
What is a reverse dominance hierarchy?
It is the arrangement Christopher Boehm described in which the members of a small band act together to hold down anyone who would dominate them. Gossip, ridicule and shared sanction are the tools.
Why do groups cut down people who act too big?
In the account in The Elephant in the Brain, a band that levels its would-be bosses keeps power shared. A population model by Calmettes and Weiss found equality could emerge from self-centred individuals once gossip allowed coalitions against dominant ones.
Is gossip part of how equality is kept?
In a comparison of 174 Ju/'hoan conversations, day talk centred on economic matters and gossip, while night talk moved to songs, dances and stories that carry shared rules.
Does self-promotion backfire today?
In three experiments, people overestimated how pleased listeners would be and underestimated how annoyed they would be, and the targets saw self-promoters as less likeable braggarts.
Sources
Simler, K., & Hanson, R. The Elephant in the Brain. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Elephant in the Brain.
Wiessner, P. W. (2014). Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.1404212111 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1404212111
Calmettes, G., & Weiss, J. N. (2017). The emergence of egalitarianism in a model of early human societies. Heliyon. doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2017.e00451 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2017.e00451
Scopelliti, I., Loewenstein, G., & Vosgerau, J. (2015). You call it self-exuberance and I call it bragging. Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/0956797615573516 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615573516