The first thing that comes to mind reading this is today’s cancel culture operating by the same principles. Only the dominance mechanics, rather than using physical, chimpanzee-like violence, uses the invisible violence of reputation destruction.
To wit, Dr Robert Galatzer-Levy of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute studied the Columbine Tragedy extensively, leading him to study how the Thalamus channels both physical pain pathways to the cortex to understand the meaning of pain but also emotional pathways joining it.
When “emotional pain” such as loss of self-esteem in dominance experiences occurs absent physical pain (physical violence being one source), the result is the cortex and our conscious understanding has us experience “an insult is no different from a punch to the face.”
Reputation being at the identity level sense of self, reputation destruction seems to be a “killing” equivalent, a psychologically murderous chimpanzee-like dominance act, while not physical like the actual chimpanzee hierarchies.
And if you look at Deborah Tannen’s work studying average behavior of boys vs girls when she says the worst thing that happens to girls is exclusion from groups but the worst thing that happens to boys is being “one upped” or defeated, placed lower in the hierarchy for “losing” it seems to have a place in this model.
Boys and men talk of “making a killing” or “killing the ball” in baseball or “killing it” with a successful work project- all expressions not of physical violence but of the instinct Barry and Seager have researched in males specifically, called “fighting and winning.”
At the instinct level which is felt at the deepest level of identity and “existing”, being excluded for girls and women or being “a loser” for boys and men in a hierarchy might feel like “dying” just a little, “thalamically” like reputation destruction both feels and cognitively processes to conscious life like “being killed” - words no different than a punch to the face, or a death blow if substantial enough.
I imagine this type of analysis makes a lot of people uncomfortable, because a lot of it comes off as a zero sum game. For some people to be high status then naturally others have to be lower status, etc. Also with the discussion of depression it feels like that could be a consequence of low status/power or a cause of it.
Wow excellent article, very well researched, but there is only one thing I would like to Nitpick here sometimes prestige and dominance doesn't play a part. There are incidences of cronyism and nepotism where people are promoted on the basis of class, family affiliation and even race to an extent sure you can be competent but in well established circles you won't be granted access. This is probably the biggest bone I have to pick with evo-psych it's oversimplification of complex hierarchies.
There is also one more interesting idea which I have been looking into and is being researched quite heavily in Goldsmith's university by the researcher Agnieszka Golec de Zavala , the idea of collective narcissism which is the tendency to exaggerate the positive image and importance of a group to which one belongs. The group may be defined by ideology, race, political beliefs/stance, religion, sexual orientation, social class, language, nationality, employment status, education level, cultural values, or any other ingroup. So you would imagine the rules of dominance and prestige based leadership don't actually apply to the above scenario. I think you may have touched on this when looking into the concept of "luxury beliefs"
But hey would love and be grateful to hear your thoughts on this ?
This was a great article. In myself, I have found that I was given status by my peers for popularity. I maintained this person (self) for as long as I could manage. Then, I got overwhelmed. I didn't want to be on all the time. For 10 plus years now, I actively try not to find myself in friend groups and try very hard to stay to myself. I am grateful people find me likeable, but it's not who I naturally am. It's too chaotic, so I've retreated altogether.
This was a great read Rob. So many learning nuggets to take away.
"So what did status get our human ancestors? Resources, allies, territory, mates, and, most importantly, offspring." -- "Someone upsets you, you immediately start planning ways to get revenge without them knowing." -- "Another finding which helps to understand the difference between status and power is that men want power more than women do, whereas women want status more than men do."
These have me thinking about our current culture war including the attacks on free speech and systemic character and reputational attacks of people that oppose woke ideology.
Woke ideology manifests from Critical Theory content in education. It seems to be driven from 3rd wave feminists committed to a postmodernist agenda... and most of the active believers and practitioners in society appear to be educated women... primarily educated white women from upper-class families.
And when considering the human evolutionary psychology of dominance, prestige and power... the connection to innate, animalistic and survivalist motivations... it appears to me that we have headed down a path where all of these nature-developed behaviors that result in a hierarchy-filtering that best-serves the human condition are being overridden.
It appears to me that our evolutionary norms that sustain the species are being dismantled to our detriment.
For example, you say that “The currency of evolution is reproduction.”
But the current seek of high status within the “new culture” of luxury beliefs driven primarily by these woke educated females includes rejecting marriage and raising children.
"Relatedly, self-esteem is tightly linked with social status." -- "Sometimes we want to avoid the envy of others, and downplay our achievements in order to better get along with the group." -- "Some people see prestigious individuals who obtained their positions through skill, competence, and hard work and claim that these individuals seized their status through the use of dominant or deceptive strategies."
This caused me self-reflection. I think a level of real self-confidence of a strong moral core and the ability to accomplish difficult tasks to achieve meaningful goals... and that often naturally results in the achievement of status and prestige within a peer group... supports the lack of motivation to pursue status and prestige. I downplay it not because I want to get a long better with the the group... I downplay it because I think the entire impulse in people to confer status to others is a sign of their weakness... and also a sign of weakness in those that crave it. The exception to this is status conferred based on real achievement of challenging accomplishment.
One example that irritates the crap out of me is the conferred status and prestige for politicians and government officials. I work with both on a regular basis and I can tell you that most of them not only are not deserving because of the lack of demonstrated achievement, but they are actually below the norm of capable and moral people that should even be candidates in the pool of high status and high prestige.
"People also have strong emotional reactions to status gains. You feel pride, honor, jubilation, and so on. And you feel strongly about losses to status as well, with shame, humiliation, embarrassment, and so on." -- "and yet people feel awful if they are excluded in it." -- "Being socially devalued seems to be like a red light. The loss of status is a strong situation, people generally have a similar response to it, suggesting status is indeed a fundamental human need."
This reminded me of something else I read... that humans, because we are so damn dependent on our parents for such a long percentage of our life-expectancy... have a natural visceral and extreme emotional negative response to feelings of rejection. If our parents reject us while we are children we will likely die.
It seems we carry that with us. Feeling rejected... even if from a complete stranger... causes some deep primitive response of anger that leads to a commitment to retribution.
This was a key leadership lesson for me in my role as a corporate change agent. Stakeholder assessment is important because otherwise if people feel left out of the change that they believe they should be involved in, resentment will build and they will be motivated to undermine the change rather than support it.
And the same is true with family and friends. I have had friendships inexplicably deteriorate, and conflicts with family, and only later in conversation learned that the reason was some project or activity that my friend or family member expected me to reach out and ask for help or advice because they had a background and/or knowledge in the thing. I have two brothers and one is an investor in the family business, the other does not have money to invest but was angry at me for not making the offer for him to invest.
I keep thinking that much of what is causing so much social turmoil in our society these days is not so much the economic gaps, but the feeling of being left out of mainstream society. The inexplicable part of that is the people that seem motivated to divide us more... make people even more resentful at about being locked out of the mainstream. But you helped me explain that with this quote:
"In short, humans domesticated themselves to be kind, loyal, and cooperative with their in-group. And absolutely vicious to outsiders, to the out-group."
This is where our current and last President has been so terrible for the country. Both have taken a strategy to appeal to their base at the expense of "the others". Both have been divisive instead of helping the majority of the county feel like respected stakeholders in the country. They both created the in-group and the out-group and, with the help of a broken and corrupt media, revved up the conflict between them.
Hopefully this next election we get a true leader that understand stakeholder analysis and this innate negative human response to feeling rejected.
Outstanding delineation and sorely needed considering the CRT - Marxist crowd has decided that ONLY power alone is the enzyme that governs all else. Spooky that so many can be so uncurious. But how can messages like this, that should and could lead to breakthrough understanding be more widely disseminated. Bar bouncers have power for sure and Mother Teresa has prestige for sure. Whom did she cheat to gain her prestige (or power). But the indoctrinated and uncurious Left have no interest in such puzzles; they know enough to change the world and that's all that's needed to a true zealot. I'd love to see a survey of how many on the far Left have even heard of Big Five Personality Factor tests and conclusions. It's doubtful the numbers would be consistent with such a related yet critical body of thought (or simply inquiry). The Left hates "deplorables." Liberty lovers need to prepare and relate in the strongest manner to those who feel qualified or entitled to judge who is "deplorable," because if you're read this far in this comment and agree even in the smallest measure, they're coming for you too.
Thank you for the very thoughtful and thought-provoking article. I enjoyed it very much. I wonder, however, if this kind of analysis would benefit from a less teleological view of evolution ( https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/crossbill-finches-evolution-and-bisexual ), and a recognition of the very messy (and nonlinear) evolutionary history that gave rise to modern Homo sapiens. Often, we think of the characteristics of humans with which we are most familiar and then make a post-hoc assumption that some hypothetical, pre-modern group benefited from having "evolved" those characteristics. My sense is that the story's a bit more complicated. Thank you again for a great essay. Sincerely, Frederick
The first thing that comes to mind reading this is today’s cancel culture operating by the same principles. Only the dominance mechanics, rather than using physical, chimpanzee-like violence, uses the invisible violence of reputation destruction.
To wit, Dr Robert Galatzer-Levy of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute studied the Columbine Tragedy extensively, leading him to study how the Thalamus channels both physical pain pathways to the cortex to understand the meaning of pain but also emotional pathways joining it.
When “emotional pain” such as loss of self-esteem in dominance experiences occurs absent physical pain (physical violence being one source), the result is the cortex and our conscious understanding has us experience “an insult is no different from a punch to the face.”
Reputation being at the identity level sense of self, reputation destruction seems to be a “killing” equivalent, a psychologically murderous chimpanzee-like dominance act, while not physical like the actual chimpanzee hierarchies.
And if you look at Deborah Tannen’s work studying average behavior of boys vs girls when she says the worst thing that happens to girls is exclusion from groups but the worst thing that happens to boys is being “one upped” or defeated, placed lower in the hierarchy for “losing” it seems to have a place in this model.
Boys and men talk of “making a killing” or “killing the ball” in baseball or “killing it” with a successful work project- all expressions not of physical violence but of the instinct Barry and Seager have researched in males specifically, called “fighting and winning.”
At the instinct level which is felt at the deepest level of identity and “existing”, being excluded for girls and women or being “a loser” for boys and men in a hierarchy might feel like “dying” just a little, “thalamically” like reputation destruction both feels and cognitively processes to conscious life like “being killed” - words no different than a punch to the face, or a death blow if substantial enough.
“the love of money is the root of all evil”, not “money is the root of all evil”
I imagine this type of analysis makes a lot of people uncomfortable, because a lot of it comes off as a zero sum game. For some people to be high status then naturally others have to be lower status, etc. Also with the discussion of depression it feels like that could be a consequence of low status/power or a cause of it.
Wow excellent article, very well researched, but there is only one thing I would like to Nitpick here sometimes prestige and dominance doesn't play a part. There are incidences of cronyism and nepotism where people are promoted on the basis of class, family affiliation and even race to an extent sure you can be competent but in well established circles you won't be granted access. This is probably the biggest bone I have to pick with evo-psych it's oversimplification of complex hierarchies.
There is also one more interesting idea which I have been looking into and is being researched quite heavily in Goldsmith's university by the researcher Agnieszka Golec de Zavala , the idea of collective narcissism which is the tendency to exaggerate the positive image and importance of a group to which one belongs. The group may be defined by ideology, race, political beliefs/stance, religion, sexual orientation, social class, language, nationality, employment status, education level, cultural values, or any other ingroup. So you would imagine the rules of dominance and prestige based leadership don't actually apply to the above scenario. I think you may have touched on this when looking into the concept of "luxury beliefs"
But hey would love and be grateful to hear your thoughts on this ?
This was a great article. In myself, I have found that I was given status by my peers for popularity. I maintained this person (self) for as long as I could manage. Then, I got overwhelmed. I didn't want to be on all the time. For 10 plus years now, I actively try not to find myself in friend groups and try very hard to stay to myself. I am grateful people find me likeable, but it's not who I naturally am. It's too chaotic, so I've retreated altogether.
This was a great read Rob. So many learning nuggets to take away.
"So what did status get our human ancestors? Resources, allies, territory, mates, and, most importantly, offspring." -- "Someone upsets you, you immediately start planning ways to get revenge without them knowing." -- "Another finding which helps to understand the difference between status and power is that men want power more than women do, whereas women want status more than men do."
These have me thinking about our current culture war including the attacks on free speech and systemic character and reputational attacks of people that oppose woke ideology.
Woke ideology manifests from Critical Theory content in education. It seems to be driven from 3rd wave feminists committed to a postmodernist agenda... and most of the active believers and practitioners in society appear to be educated women... primarily educated white women from upper-class families.
And when considering the human evolutionary psychology of dominance, prestige and power... the connection to innate, animalistic and survivalist motivations... it appears to me that we have headed down a path where all of these nature-developed behaviors that result in a hierarchy-filtering that best-serves the human condition are being overridden.
It appears to me that our evolutionary norms that sustain the species are being dismantled to our detriment.
For example, you say that “The currency of evolution is reproduction.”
But the current seek of high status within the “new culture” of luxury beliefs driven primarily by these woke educated females includes rejecting marriage and raising children.
"Relatedly, self-esteem is tightly linked with social status." -- "Sometimes we want to avoid the envy of others, and downplay our achievements in order to better get along with the group." -- "Some people see prestigious individuals who obtained their positions through skill, competence, and hard work and claim that these individuals seized their status through the use of dominant or deceptive strategies."
This caused me self-reflection. I think a level of real self-confidence of a strong moral core and the ability to accomplish difficult tasks to achieve meaningful goals... and that often naturally results in the achievement of status and prestige within a peer group... supports the lack of motivation to pursue status and prestige. I downplay it not because I want to get a long better with the the group... I downplay it because I think the entire impulse in people to confer status to others is a sign of their weakness... and also a sign of weakness in those that crave it. The exception to this is status conferred based on real achievement of challenging accomplishment.
One example that irritates the crap out of me is the conferred status and prestige for politicians and government officials. I work with both on a regular basis and I can tell you that most of them not only are not deserving because of the lack of demonstrated achievement, but they are actually below the norm of capable and moral people that should even be candidates in the pool of high status and high prestige.
"People also have strong emotional reactions to status gains. You feel pride, honor, jubilation, and so on. And you feel strongly about losses to status as well, with shame, humiliation, embarrassment, and so on." -- "and yet people feel awful if they are excluded in it." -- "Being socially devalued seems to be like a red light. The loss of status is a strong situation, people generally have a similar response to it, suggesting status is indeed a fundamental human need."
This reminded me of something else I read... that humans, because we are so damn dependent on our parents for such a long percentage of our life-expectancy... have a natural visceral and extreme emotional negative response to feelings of rejection. If our parents reject us while we are children we will likely die.
It seems we carry that with us. Feeling rejected... even if from a complete stranger... causes some deep primitive response of anger that leads to a commitment to retribution.
This was a key leadership lesson for me in my role as a corporate change agent. Stakeholder assessment is important because otherwise if people feel left out of the change that they believe they should be involved in, resentment will build and they will be motivated to undermine the change rather than support it.
And the same is true with family and friends. I have had friendships inexplicably deteriorate, and conflicts with family, and only later in conversation learned that the reason was some project or activity that my friend or family member expected me to reach out and ask for help or advice because they had a background and/or knowledge in the thing. I have two brothers and one is an investor in the family business, the other does not have money to invest but was angry at me for not making the offer for him to invest.
I keep thinking that much of what is causing so much social turmoil in our society these days is not so much the economic gaps, but the feeling of being left out of mainstream society. The inexplicable part of that is the people that seem motivated to divide us more... make people even more resentful at about being locked out of the mainstream. But you helped me explain that with this quote:
"In short, humans domesticated themselves to be kind, loyal, and cooperative with their in-group. And absolutely vicious to outsiders, to the out-group."
This is where our current and last President has been so terrible for the country. Both have taken a strategy to appeal to their base at the expense of "the others". Both have been divisive instead of helping the majority of the county feel like respected stakeholders in the country. They both created the in-group and the out-group and, with the help of a broken and corrupt media, revved up the conflict between them.
Hopefully this next election we get a true leader that understand stakeholder analysis and this innate negative human response to feeling rejected.
I'm reminded of the lyrics to the song "My Girls" by Indie Pop band the Animal Collective:
"I don't mean to seem like I care about material things
Like a social status
I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls."
How true are these lyrics?
Outstanding delineation and sorely needed considering the CRT - Marxist crowd has decided that ONLY power alone is the enzyme that governs all else. Spooky that so many can be so uncurious. But how can messages like this, that should and could lead to breakthrough understanding be more widely disseminated. Bar bouncers have power for sure and Mother Teresa has prestige for sure. Whom did she cheat to gain her prestige (or power). But the indoctrinated and uncurious Left have no interest in such puzzles; they know enough to change the world and that's all that's needed to a true zealot. I'd love to see a survey of how many on the far Left have even heard of Big Five Personality Factor tests and conclusions. It's doubtful the numbers would be consistent with such a related yet critical body of thought (or simply inquiry). The Left hates "deplorables." Liberty lovers need to prepare and relate in the strongest manner to those who feel qualified or entitled to judge who is "deplorable," because if you're read this far in this comment and agree even in the smallest measure, they're coming for you too.
This was great. I’m going to incorporate this into my leadership class.
Thank you for the very thoughtful and thought-provoking article. I enjoyed it very much. I wonder, however, if this kind of analysis would benefit from a less teleological view of evolution ( https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/crossbill-finches-evolution-and-bisexual ), and a recognition of the very messy (and nonlinear) evolutionary history that gave rise to modern Homo sapiens. Often, we think of the characteristics of humans with which we are most familiar and then make a post-hoc assumption that some hypothetical, pre-modern group benefited from having "evolved" those characteristics. My sense is that the story's a bit more complicated. Thank you again for a great essay. Sincerely, Frederick