Definition
The development of the ability to use cues to dominance, such as physical power, social power, or access to resources, to reason and make inferences about species-specific social hierarchies.
Introduction
Social hierarchies, defined here as organizational structures in which certain individuals or groups have greater social power and/or access to resources than others, are ubiquitous across cultures and species (Cheney and Seyfarth 2007). These hierarchies shape many aspects of life, from one’s desirability as a social partner or mate, to overall health and well-being (Marmot and Sapolsky 2014). Social hierarchies serve to reduce the need for physical aggression, maintain group stability, and enable predictability in social environments; by knowing each individual’s position in the hierarchy, one can predict the likely outcomes of interactions with group members and behave accordingly.
Given the ubiquity...
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Mandalaywala, T.M. (2021). Emergence of Social Reasoning About Hierarchies. In: Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_2628
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