The Big Man Mechanism: how prestige fosters cooperation and creates prosocial leaders.

ABSTRACT: Anthropological evidence from diverse societies suggests that prestige-based leadership may provide a foundation for cooperation in many contexts. Here, inspired by such ethnographic observations and building on a foundation of existing research on the evolution of prestige, we develop a set of formal models to explore when an evolved prestige psychology might drive the cultural evolution of n-person cooperation, and how such a cultural evolutionary process might create novel selection pressures for genes that make prestigious individuals more prosocial. Our results reveal (i) how prestige can foster the cultural emergence of cooperation by generating correlated behavioural phenotypes, both between leaders and followers, and among followers; (ii) why, in the wake of cultural evolution, nat

SUBMITTER: Henrich J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4633849 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature