Dominance Hierarchy
Description
Counterdominance
Cathryn Townsend:
Cognitive psychologists Whiten and Erdal (2012) use the term “counterdominance” to describe the practice whereby coalitions come together to curb dominant individuals, thus creating more egalitarian social conditions.
They argue that the unique selection pressure involved in human evolution was the formation of a socio-cognitive niche that included multiway positive feedback loops between five elements:
(1) cooperation,
(2) egalitarianism,
(3) theory of mind,
(4) language, and
(5) cultural transmission.
Within this adaptive niche, which the authors call “deep social mind,” there is tight interlinkage between egalitarianism and cooperation, which allowed hunter-gatherers to successfully pool together to procure and share resources. Cooperative egalitarianism in turn supported cultural transmission of knowledge. The acquisition of language and
mind reading that could then be created through sharing knowledge in turn allowed
for interpersonal coordination of activities and ultimately for the reinforcement of the
egalitarian cultural ethos. They argue that maximum egalitarianism was achieved during the period from the origins of Homo sapiens up until the emergence of farming at
the end of the Pleistocene. "
(https://www.academia.edu/29417676/Egalitarianism_the_evolution_of)
Reverse Dominance
Cathryn Townsend:
Evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm (1999) uses the terms “reverse dominance” or “reverse dominance hierarchy” to describe the outcome of egalitarian practices, with the implication that egalitarianism evolved by means of the majority in social groups coalescing to rebel against the tyranny of alpha males. Boehm proposes that human morality is the product of egalitarian behaviors over the course of 6 million years during which social controls such as punishments exerted against antisocial and selfish individuals created selection pressure that worked in favor of altruistic behavior and against despotic or antisocial behavior. The egalitarian social organization of hunter-gatherer bands thus led to the emergence of a social conscience, including feelings of virtue and shame. Gintis, van Schaik, and Boehm (2015) have argued that a mixture of factors such as the domestication of fire, availability of lethal weapons, and cooperative breeding constitute a niche in which egalitarian social structures overturned typical primate-style hierarchies."
(https://www.academia.edu/29417676/Egalitarianism_the_evolution_of)
Characteristics
Daniel Bitton:
"I want to lay out the basic building blocks or ingredients of dominance hierarchy, it will be a lot easier to understand what’s happening in this book and more importantly what’s going on in he world around us.
So, the particular details of the road to dominance hierarchy will be different in every case – but the general path is always the same – the only way that you can get a dominance hierarchy is if two general conditions are met:
- 1 is that some people are able to control access to resources that other people need in order to live.
- 2, which I ironically realized from reading this book – is that you also need for there to be no easy or preferable way for those people who don’t control the resources, to go off and go get decent alternative resources somewhere else.
Those are the ingredients of dominance hierarchy. That’s it, that’s all.
In any given situation, if you want to understand why there is a dominance hierarchy, and why it’s milder or harsher in one place than in another, then your task is just a matter of figuring out what the circumstances are which establish these two criteria. And if you want to reduce or get rid of that hierarchy, you need to figure out how you can change or moderate those circumstances."
(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/2022/02/22/10-3xcript/)