Abstract
Durkee et al. (2020) conducted a cross-cultural investigation of people’s beliefs about how traits, behaviors, and practices that enhance an individual’s perceived ability to generate benefits (prestige) or inflict costs (dominance) promote perceived social status in humans. In this online extended version of our letter, we (a) identify multicollinearity in the authors’ statistical analyses and explain how this statistical problem renders their results inconclusive as to how benefit-delivery and cost-infliction contribute to status allocation; (b) outline flaws in the authors’ operationalization and measures of social status, and discuss how they bias results toward benefit-delivery and underestimate any effect of cost-infliction; and (c) discuss a broader problem with the critical assumption underlying Durkee et al.’s approach: people’s subjective beliefs about what determines status do not serve as sufficient evidence for determining how status asymmetries are actually established in real life. Together, these three major issues severely undermine the authors’ conclusion that there is little evidence for dominance. In closing, we briefly survey the broader empirical record on actual status relations among real people (rather than people’s beliefs about what leads to status), conducted both in the lab and in naturalistic settings; these studies consistently yield opposite conclusions to Durkee et al. and demonstrate that both prestige and dominance govern human status hierarchies.
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