Dominance and Prestige

What it is

The argument Henrich and Gil-White make is evolutionary and comparative. Dominance hierarchies are widespread among social animals and run on the threat of force: the subordinate defers because deferring is safer. Prestige, they argue, is distinctively developed in humans and runs on the value of learning from someone: the deference is given freely, and what it buys is proximity to a model worth copying.

The two produce opposite signatures in behaviour. Under dominance, attention flows upward under compulsion and the high-ranked are watched carefully by people who would rather not be noticed watching. Under prestige, attention flows upward willingly and the high-ranked are sought out.

Eye contact is the example most often used. Under dominance, eye contact is an act of aggression and a prerogative of the higher-ranked, so subordinates look away first and steal glances. Under prestige, eye contact is something offered as a gift, and the low-status person's problem is not that they are stared at but that they are not looked at.

In effect

The measure that turns this into data is the visual dominance ratio, proposed by Steve Ellyson and John Dovidio: the proportion of time spent making eye contact while speaking, set against the proportion while listening. A ratio near one indicates high dominance. A ratio around six-tenths indicates low.

The findings usually cited run in the expected direction. Officer cadets differ by rank. Undergraduates told that a conversational partner was or was not college-bound adjust accordingly. Experts of either sex show the high pattern when talking inside their own field and the low pattern outside it.

Those figures need a chain of custody attached every time they are used. In the popular treatment that carries them into general circulation they are quoted from another popular book rather than from the primary papers, the first authors are not named, and the underlying studies are small American laboratory work from several decades ago. Anyone citing them is citing a summary of a summary and should either say so or go to the primaries. To the credit of the authors who repeat them, they do note that all the studies were performed on Americans.

The concept itself is more useful than those numbers. It explains why two very differently behaved people can occupy the same position in an organisation, and why a strategy that works for one of them fails badly for the other.

What it does not say

It does not say that people are one type or the other. Both routes are available to the same person and the mix shifts with the situation, which is what the expert-inside-and-outside-their-field result is showing.

It does not say prestige is the nice version and dominance the nasty one. Both are descriptions of how deference is produced. Prestige-based hierarchies can be exclusionary and coercive in their own ways.

It does not come with the credit the popular treatments give it. The distinction is a cited finding with named authors, and books that use it throughout regularly fail to name them anywhere in the prose.

And the eye-contact figures do not carry the weight they are usually asked to. They are small, old, single-country laboratory results reaching the reader at two removes, and they illustrate the distinction rather than establishing it.

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