It’s commonly said that you can tell a person from the company they keep, but it’s always good to have evidence to back up what seems to be heuristically true.  Evidence to that effect comes via a recent study from the University of Richmond, which explored whether cooperating with higher status people has an impact upon our own social status.

The researchers examined an Amazonian community for eight years to explore how hierarchy evolved.  The community is typified by an informal form of status, with hierarchy clearly evident during meetings by who has the most verbal influence.  The influential men in this community were also found to have better health and their children were more likely to survive.

The researchers asked community members to rank the men in the community at three points during the eight-year study period, while also disclosing the men they cooperated with on a regular basis.

Cooperating to success

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those with high status tended to attract more people wanting to cooperate with them, but what was interesting is that men were gaining status every time they cooperated with those of higher status than themselves.  The authors believe this is because you tend to gain knowledge and resources from those engagements, while also signaling various virtuous attributes to the community.

“The finding that status depends on cooperation provides insight into why human societies, particularly small-scale societies like the Tsimane, are relatively egalitarian compared to other primates,” the authors explain. “Humans allocate status based on the benefits we can provide to others, often more than on the costs we can inflict.”

There is a strong evolutionary basis for this reliance on other people, whether for producing food, learning new skills or defending and raising new offspring.  While individuals can gain a certain status within our communities, it’s only when their knowledge is transferred throughout that the community as a whole benefits.

For much of human history, status inequality was largely constrained as members of the community cooperated with each other and the skills and knowledge that underpinned status rapidly spread.  This began to change with the spread of agriculture and human communities grew in size, which coincided with the production of private wealth.

“Widespread cooperation among community members becomes difficult as community size increases, and individuals with more wealth can lose incentive to cooperate with the non-wealthy outside of more market-based or coercive transactions,” the authors explain. “These processes limit upward mobility and fuel stratification by wealth class.”

The researchers believe their work is one of the first studies to provide clear evidence of the importance of cooperation in defining social status within a community, and that the relationship is a bidirectional one.

“That is, humans, compared to other animals, give status to those who provide benefits to groups, and are thus more attracted to these individuals as cooperative partners,” the authors conclude. “At the same time, individuals increase their own status by cooperating with such high status.”