ELC Theory, Part 5: Evolutionary Psychology and Social Hierarchy

I am currently studying Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC). ELC takes the findings of Evolutionary Psychology and applies them to the study of literature.

I have been a student of evolutionary psychology (EP) for most of its history. I first read Steven Pinker's Language Instinct in 1995. I studied both Pinker's How the Mind Works (1997) and David Buss's textbook Evolutionary Psychology (first edition, 1999) when they first came out. For EP social psychology, I read David Berreby's Us and Them (2005).

To be systematic in my studies, I decided to go back and review exactly what EP is. What is the current state of understanding in the field? To that end, I obtained the most recent edition of Buss's Evolutionary Psychology (sixth edition, 2019). I also obtained a British textbook by Lance Workman and Will Reader called Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction (fourth edition, 2021).

One major difference between the two textbooks is in the area of human social psychology. Buss has lengthy discussions of dominance and status hierarchies within human groups. Workman and Reader do not. Buss has an entire chapter on the subject; in Workman and Reader, the words Dominance and Status are not listed in their index.

As for my own perspective, I follow Buss and Berreby and place a high priority on dominance and status hierarchies. I differ from Buss in that I view the formation of status hierarchies as a complex interplay between those higher in the rankings and those lower in the rankings. Sometimes status is determined collectively by the lower-ranked members of the group: through a bottom-up decision process they confer higher status on some members of the group. Dominance rankings might be determined by violence and threats of violence, but not all forms of status are generated from the top down.

For example, I do not believe that one can arrive at a rich understanding of how humor and comedy work in human beings without recognizing the centrality of status hierarchies within human groups. Someone who asserts a position higher than the group consensus will be ridiculed and laughed at.

People who know me might find it ironic that I subscribe to the importance of hierarchies. I am a Quaker, and one of the defining features of the Religious Society of Friends is a commitment to not having formal status hierarchies. Early Quakers were jailed for not taking off their hats to their betters; they defiantly rejected the formal hierarchies of their day. In a Quaker Meeting for Worship, anyone can speak up to a point. Decisions are made by a process related to group consensus.

What I have observed from Quaker process is that informal status hierarchies form in any human group, even ones that explicitly reject formal hierarchies. The Quaker process prevents top-down hierarchies from forming, especially dominance hierarchies based on violence, but bottom-up, informal hierarchies characterize the organization. A person upon whom status is conveyed by the group is called a Weighty Friend. A person who has been expelled from the group has been "read out of meeting," or explicitly rejected.

Back to evolutionary psychology. My point is that the field of evolutionary psychology is not crisply defined. There can be multiple ways of characterizing it. Some include status and dominance hierarchies, and some do not. Because some versions of evolutionary psychology see status hierarchies as fundamental, and other versions do not even broach the topic, this can result in widely divergent schools of evolutionary psychology and, from them, different toolboxes which can be employed in evolutionary literary criticism.