The Lifespan of Social Hierarchies: Formation, Maintenance, Navigation, and Change

Abstract: Social hierarchies pervade groups and inevitably spark conflict, yet they also provide social structures and resources for managing and resolving conflict. Thus, better understanding social hierarchy is a crucial part of understanding conflict and conflict resolution. This symposium looks across the lifespan of social hierarchies to consider how they form, how they are maintained and navigated, and how they might change. Speaker 1 presents a novel method to study how hierarchy emerges in egalitarian groups, known as the Promotion Game. This method can be adapted to study countless antecedent processes; for example, initial results suggest that variability in cooperativeness gives rise to status hierarchies within groups. Speaker 2 examines how hierarchies are maintained via high-status individuals’ concerns about status loss. This work finds that concerns about status loss lead high-status individuals to protect their position unethically, but this can be mitigated in situations where high-status individuals’ behaviors are observable. Speaker 3 investigates differences between motivation and insatiability for power and status. Six studies find that motivation predicts prosocial behavior, whereas insatiability predicts antisocial behavior, and this pattern stems from divergent beliefs about whether power and status are scarce resources. Speaker 4 examines how hierarchies change by virtue of challenges to the rankings or the bases of a hierarchy. Nine studies find that people prefer to contest the rankings within a specific hierarchy because the bases of rankings are considered more universal across hierarchies. This work offers a new perspective on how people challenge inequality and how hierarchies change in response.

Keywords: Hierarchy; Power; Status; Experiments