Face value
In 1964, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon discovered a large population of indigenous Amerindians called the Yanomamo living in almost complete seclusion deep in the Amazonian rainforests. One of the most unusual and surprising features of Yanomamo culture, Chagnon discovered, was the preference for an egalitarian social structure to a hierarchical one; group members perceived material resources such as food and tools as belonging to group members rather than to any one individual. The apparent lack of a conventional social hierarchy presented a culture shock to the American anthropologist.
From ants and fish to birds and primates, social status hierarchy is a ubiquitous principle of social organisation. Dominant groups or individuals often have primary access to precious resources such as space, food and social partners, while subordinate groups and individuals may expect protection or care from those of higher rank. Navigating the social world relies on the ability to accurately infer one’s own social status as well as the status of others within the group. Ants and bees, for instance, use body size to determine social status, while birds and primates infer social status from non-verbal cues that either expand or constrict body postures and subsequently alter perceived physical size.
Similar non-verbal cues expressed in the human face and body signal dominance and submission. Dominant individuals often express negative emotions, such as anger, which signals aggression and the intent to approach another person, whereas submissive individuals often express fear, which signals withdrawal and submission. Similarly, looking at someone directly in the eyes expresses dominance, whereas averting one’s gaze signals submission. Inferring dominance and submission from the face relies on a specific network of brain regions, including the human amygdala.
Judging relative social status requires more than the ability to perceive another individual’s status. There must also be a mechanism that calculates whether this status is higher or lower than that of others. In a series of experiments with university students and military officers, my collaborators and I have examined whether or not the ability to compare the relative social status of people is due to a specialised competence or a more general ability to compare the magnitude of any two items in the environment along a continuous dimension, such as height, weight or brightness. We tested this by looking for a signature of general comparison processing within social status. People take more time to compare two items that are closer in value (such as the numbers 64 and 65) than they do to compare those that are further apart (such as the numbers two and 65), a phenomenon known as the semantic distance effect. This pattern is thought to reflect arrangement of values along a mental number line such that close items are represented more closely in mental space than items that are far apart. Similarly, our research has shown that people take longer to compare two social occupations that are closer in social status (such as a manager and a supervisor) than they do to compare those that are further apart (such as a janitor and a president), suggesting that social comparison is related to general comparison processes.
Social status comparisons also recruit a set of brain regions that are associated with numerical comparisons. Convergent neuroscience evidence from non-human primates and humans have shown that brain activity within the inferior parietal sulcus (IPS), a brain region located within the parietal lobes, is recruited when people compare numbers. We recently showed that this same brain region, the IPS, is recruited when naval officers compare the social status of other officers. Our findings show that a brain mechanism present in both human and non-human primates underlies social status inferences, illustrating the deep imprint of evolution in shaping the biology underlying the way in which humans think about and infer social status.
Cultural forces, such as stereotypes, can also exert powerful influences on societal structure, including how we choose our leaders. For example, most modern industrialised societies hold a lengthy electoral process to encourage people to choose leaders based on their policy positions rather than non-verbal behaviour. Every year, huge sums are spent on political advertising in order to educate voters about the policy differences between political candidates. Yet recent evidence from social psychology suggests that people still rely on shallow decision heuristics rather than on rational decision-making processes when deciding whom to vote for in major political elections. It is possible to make accurate predictions based on a candidate’s facial appearance about whether they will emerge victorious in political elections. Despite the considerable emphasis that political candidates place on distinguishing their policies from those of other political parties, voters seem as likely to base decisions on what a candidate looks like as what a candidate stands for.
Glass ceiling?
Interestingly, human reliance on shallow decision heuristics when choosing political leaders may underlie political gender gaps observed throughout human history. People are now more likely than ever to vote for a woman for the highest political offices, yet in 2006, women had served as the head of government in only seven countries. Recent research in our lab has shown a gender bias in the facial inferences that predict voting behaviour. Both male and female voters are more likely to vote for female politicians who not only appear competent, but also attractive, a phenomenon that is likely to stem from our evolutionary heritage. Both male and female voters value physical attractiveness in female politicians because it is important in sexual selection; this engenders a broader cultural expectation that attractive women are more deserving of high professional status.
While such intuitive heuristics probably confer adaptive benefits during mate selection, they are incongruent with modern cultural ideals of gender equality in political representation and political power. Notably, exposure to female politicians has been shown to reduce use of gender stereotypes when evaluating leadership effectiveness as well as overall negative biases towards female leaders. As women become an increasingly visible presence in electoral politics and government, voters may begin to reduce their reliance on such cognitive shortcuts.
Facial appearance influences not only electoral success but also corporate success. In one study, social psychologists Nicholas O’Rule and Nalini Ambady showed students photographs of company CEOs from the 2006 Fortune 500 listing. Companies run by CEOs whose appearance was rated as more powerful reported greater financial profits than those run by CEOs whose appearance was rated as less powerful. Another study, this time run by social psychologist Robert Livingston and colleagues, found an opposite effect for black CEOs; having a ‘baby face’ was more likely to be associated with higher profits than having a powerful appearance. A warmer, ‘teddy-bear’ look may assuage cultural stereotypes of blacks as threatening and dangerous, which might otherwise impede black CEOs. Having a black CEO who appears warm, rather than powerful, may help reduce cultural prejudice, thereby increasing the overall effectiveness of the company and its profits. These results illustrate the potency of facial appearance in shaping the political and financial success of leaders, as well as the important role of culture in shaping how and why some people, but not others, are ultimately successful leaders in the worlds of politics and business.
The inferences we make about other people’s social status are shaped not only by cultural and biological forces, but also by our attitudes to and preferences for either hierarchical or egalitarian social institutions, such as governments. One of the primary ways in which people differ is the extent to which they prefer egalitarianism or social hierarchy as a principle guiding social structure. This phenomenon is known as social dominance orientation (SDO). Across cultures, SDO is a stable personality trait that reflects a wide range of social and political attitudes. For instance, people who strongly prefer social hierarchy (and are therefore higher in SDO) support political ideologies that promote politico-economic conservatism and oppose public policies aiming to attenuate group-based social inequality. They also seek societal roles that reify social hierarchies within social institutions, such as law enforcement rather than social work.
Not surprisingly, the human capacity for empathy attenuates the desire for social hierarchy. People who show a strong capacity to feel concern for and share the pain of others tend to prefer egalitarianism to social hierarchy. My lab recently investigated whether or not the preference for social hierarchy or egalitarianism modulates activity within brain regions associated with empathy. Participants were shown images of Hurricane Katrina victims and were asked to report how much empathy they felt for them. We found that people who preferred egalitarianism showed a greater empathic neural response to victims of natural disasters than those who preferred hierarchy as a societal structure. These provocative findings demonstrate the subtle but important role that human empathy plays in shaping our individual and collective social and political ideologies.
Cultural differences
Cultures vary in the extent to which people prefer social hierarchy or egalitarianism. Examining the nature of national and organisational cultures, Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede observed that different worldwide cultures could be characterised by what he called ‘power distance’, a measure of how much the public accepted and expected the unequal distribution of power. In cultures with high power distance, such as Korea and India, class divisions within society are accepted and social relations across class divides are typically impersonal. By contrast, in cultures with low power distance, including the US, Canada and Australia, society leans towards egalitarianism and informal interaction among people of varying classes.
With collaborators in Korea and the US, researchers in my lab examined whether or not cultural differences in preference for social hierarchy or egalitarianism affect how far people recruit the brain regions that drive empathy when seeing suffering. As predicted, we found that participants from low power distance cultures showed a greater empathic neural response than others. Our results show that culture shapes the neurobiological circuitry that underpins our capacity to feel for others and that human tendencies to prefer egalitarianism or hierarchy arise from a complex interplay of cultural and biological forces.
Why do some cultures prefer governments that promote egalitarian values, whereas others prefer those that promote hierarchical values? The ‘great man’ theory, heralded by prominent philosophers such as Georg Hegel and Thomas Carlyle, proposes that major sociopolitical movements throughout human history, such as the French Revolution or the rise of Marxism, succeeded due to the charismatic force and political genius of their leaders, rather than broader sociocultural forces per se. Another possible explanation is that cultural differences in political preferences reflect sociocultural factors, such as geography, economics and social class, rather than the larger-than-life influence of a few. Supporting this view, the ‘pathogen-defence’ theory, developed by psychologists Corey Fincher and Mark Schaller, proposes that different geographic regions around the world have historically been threatened by environmental pressures, such as infectious diseases, to varying extents depending on their ecology. By being exposed to major threats to human survival, these geographic regions turned to hierarchical rather than egalitarian social structures as a means of imposing order and reducing the threat to human survival.
Hierarchical social institutions are more likely to succeed in imposing a formal social order across individuals and groups, reducing social contact and the potential spread of infectious diseases in the majority of population. In this way, the preference for hierarchy over egalitarianism serves as an adaptive ‘anti-pathogen’ defence, protecting the larger social group or nation from devastating pandemic disease. Supporting this view, Fincher and colleagues have shown that geographic regions that have historically been exposed to a greater prevalence of pathogens or infectious diseases are more likely to endorse collectivistic cultural values and hierarchical social structures.
From the Amazonian rainforests to London cityscapes, human social group living entails finding effective ways to coordinate the collection and distribution of the resources necessary for survival. Not surprisingly, we are biologically predisposed to adopt many of the same adaptive strategies for social coordination as other species, including recognising social status and choosing leaders to organise the distribution effort. Nevertheless, culture interacts with our biology in shaping how and why some leaders and governments succeed and others fail. Importantly, diversity in cultural values, practices and beliefs can lead to diversity in styles of leadership and governments within and across nations. This cultural diversity in political preferences and structures is proof that our evolutionary instincts for social hierarchy are not cultural destiny and that, through knowledge of where we come from and imagination about whom we may become, we can come closer to building a society with consideration and compassion for all.
Joan Chiao is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Northwestern University in the US.
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