Hierarchies are a fairly natural part of life, and certainly in the workplace. Those at the top of these hierarchies typically display what behavioral scientists refer to as dominance. Such individuals not only climb the hierarchy faster, but they climb higher.
What makes someone dominant? Researchers believe that part of the equation might be the speed with which we make decisions, with faster decision makers able to obtain ‘first mover advantage’ in social situations. What is less clear is whether dominant individuals exhibit this rapid decision-making ability outside of social situations.
That was the question posed by researchers from the University of Lausanne in a recently published study. The research suggests there is a clear correlation between the social dominance one has, and the propensity to make faster decisions, regardless of the context those decisions are made in.
Fast decision making
The researchers split a group of men into high and low dominance groups after having them complete a questionnaire designed to rank their levels of dominance. Their decision-making speed was then rated via five experiments in areas such as memory, recognition, route-learning, responsiveness and ability to distinguish emotions.
Across the first four experiments, which covered emotions, memory, recognition and control, there was no real distinction between the two groups in terms of speed of decision making. The team then carried out a fifth however, which involved capturing the neural signals, which highlighted the differences in speed of response.
The participants had their brain signals measured using an EEG machine, and were asked to distinguish between faces with various emotions, including happy and sad, and angry and neutral.
The analysis found that high dominance men tended to have a strong brain signal roughly 240 milliseconds after seeing the faces, with this signal primarily in the parts of the brain associated with emotion and behavior. The authors believe that this explains why high-dominant men responded faster in scenarios where a choice is needed, and that they have now identified a biomarker for this phenomenon.
“In the future, it will be important to find out whether even stronger brain signals are observed in particularly dominant individuals, such as CEOs,” they say. “It will also be relevant to understand whether these differences in promptness to respond and brain signals are also observed in women that differ in dominance and whether they are already present in children. Our findings may open a new research approach using EEG signatures as a measure for social dominance.”
