Social Dominance

Abstract

Social Dominance is a type of social behavior: the patterned ordering of individuals by their relative influence over contested resources, decisions, and one another's behavior. This article treats it at two levels psychology keeps apart — the individual level, where dominance is one route to rank and prestige a second, and the group level, where social-dominance orientation and theory explain how societies sustain hierarchies between groups. It sets out the dual-strategies account of how humans attain rank, the behavioral and hormonal signatures of status contests, and the way power reshapes cognition. Three interactive demonstrations let the reader move a dominance–prestige trade-off, watch a hierarchy settle out of repeated contests, and test the dual-hormone hypothesis. The aim is to show why one word spans a primate threat display, a personality scale, and the architecture of intergroup inequality.

Keywords: social dominance, dominance and prestige, social-dominance theory

Few constructs in the behavioral sciences carry as much semantic load as dominance. An ethologist uses it for the stable outcome of fights between two macaques; a personality psychologist uses it for a trait that predicts who speaks first in a committee; a political psychologist uses it for the preference some people hold that their own group sit above others. These are not loose metaphors for one another, but neither are they the same variable. The research program of the last three decades has been, in large part, an effort to say precisely how they are related — and to separate dominance, the strategy of inducing deference through intimidation and coercion, from prestige, the strategy of earning deference through demonstrated skill and freely conferred respect (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Cheng et al., 2013).

Social dominance sits inside social behavior in the sense that a dominance relationship is a relationship between organisms, read off from how they act toward one another. Its MeSH descriptor defines it narrowly — as the social structure of a group as it relates to the relative social rank or dominance status of its members — and that structural reading is where the construct began, in the observation of animal groups. Human social psychology has since pulled the term in two directions at once: down toward the individual who seeks and holds rank, and up toward the group that occupies a tier in a stratified society. This article tracks both.

What Social Dominance Is

In its oldest and most literal sense, dominance is a property of a dyad: of two animals, one reliably displaces the other at a feeding site, wins a contested mate, or occupies the preferred resting place, and the loser reliably yields. Aggregate these pairwise outcomes across a group and a dominance hierarchy emerges — often strikingly linear, so that a third animal defers to the first two, a fourth to the first three, and so on (de Waal, 1986). Crucially, the relationship is defined by the deference, not by the fighting. Once a hierarchy is established, overt aggression typically falls: the subordinate's yielding makes contests unnecessary, which is exactly why a stable hierarchy is often the more peaceful arrangement.

This structural definition is the one MeSH retains, and it travels cleanly into human groups wherever rank governs access to contested things. But human social psychology adds a question ethology could largely set aside: by what route does an individual come to occupy a high rank? The answer that has reorganized the field is that there are two, and that they are psychologically distinct.

Dominance attains rank by force and the threat of force — by inducing fear, controlling resources others need, and imposing costs on those who do not comply. Prestige attains rank by the opposite logic: by displaying valued skill or knowledge so that others choose to defer, attend, and copy, conferring status freely in exchange for proximity and learning (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). Both reliably yield influence, and both are recognized across cultures, but they feel different from the inside and look different from the outside — a distinction the next sections develop and the first demonstration makes manipulable.

The first demonstration makes this trade-off manipulable: it lets the reader set each of two members' prestige and dominance and the weight the group places on each, then reads off the combined standing and the probability that one outranks the other.

Types of Social Dominance

Social Dominance is the parent kind; MeSH places one narrower descriptor beneath it in the tree. MeSH is an indexing vocabulary, so the hierarchy below reflects how the literature is catalogued for retrieval, not a claim that the child exhausts or neatly partitions the parent. The dominance–prestige distinction, the individual–group distinction, and the behavioral–structural distinction drawn throughout this article are orthogonal to this single tree edge: they cut across it rather than nesting inside it.

Table 2. Narrower MeSH descriptor under Social Dominance (F01.145.813.650).

The single child, Dominance-Subordination, names the dyadic relation this article began with: it is the atom of which a group-level hierarchy is the aggregate. Its parent here, Social Dominance, is in turn filed under Social Behavior (D012919) in the MeSH tree — the is-a this article's abstract opens with.

Two Routes to Rank: Dominance and Prestige

The dual-strategies theory holds that the human capacity for cultural learning opened a second, non-agonistic path to social rank. In species without cumulative culture, rank is won largely by fighting ability and the deference it compels. Once a species depends on acquiring skills and knowledge from others, however, it pays to identify the most competent models and stay near them — and it pays those models, in turn, to be copied, because being a valued model brings influence and the benefits that follow it. Prestige is the status that flows from this learner's bargain: deference granted to the skilled by followers who gain from access (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001).

Cheng and colleagues showed that dominance and prestige are empirically separable, each independently predicting a person's actual influence in a group, yet operating through different mechanisms. Dominant individuals were seen as controlling and feared; prestigious individuals were seen as skilled and admired; both were rated as influential, and — tellingly — gaze-tracking showed group members looked at both high-dominance and high-prestige individuals more, by different attentional routes (Cheng et al., 2013). The two strategies even carry distinct nonverbal signatures: prototypical dominance and prestige displays differ in posture, expansiveness, and the emotions they recruit, and observers read them apart rapidly and cross-culturally (Witkower et al., 2020).

A subtlety here is that trait dominance can confer influence even in groups that nominally reward competence, because observers often read a dominant individual's confident, assertive bearing as a signal of competence itself — a competence-signaling effect that lets dominance borrow some of prestige's currency (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009). The strategies also impose different problems on the groups that contain them. Dominant leaders, precisely because their rank rests on coercion, face a chronic tension with the group's interests, and a literature on the “paradox of power” documents how dominance-motivated leaders may sabotage talented subordinates to protect their position (Maner, 2017). Prestige, resting on conferred respect, is more aligned with group benefit but harder to seize and easier to lose. Which strategy a person pursues is partly dispositional and partly a response to the social structure they find themselves in — a flexibility the third demonstration explores through the hormonal correlates of contest.

The Psychology of Power

Once rank is attained, holding it changes the holder. Keltner, Gruenfeld, and Anderson proposed that elevated power activates a behavioral approach system: the powerful attend to rewards, act more readily, experience more positive affect, and rely more on automatic, top-down construals, while the powerless are tuned to threat, inhibition, and careful, bottom-up attention to the powerful (Keltner et al., 2003). The account reframes power not as a static position but as a psychological state with reliable downstream effects on emotion, cognition, and action.

A large experimental literature has since filled this in. Magee and Galinsky's review traces how power increases goal-directed action and the propensity to act at all, loosens conformity to others' expectations, and can reduce spontaneous perspective-taking — the tendency to adopt another's visual or mental vantage point (Magee & Galinsky, 2008). These effects are not uniformly corrupting: approach-oriented action can be prosocial or antisocial depending on the goals and norms that power unleashes. But they are robust enough that what power does to people is now a research question distinct from who attains power, and the two must be kept separate in any account of dominance.

Biological and Hormonal Bases

Because dominance contests are so phylogenetically old, they have measurable physiological correlates, and testosterone is the most studied. Mazur and Booth's biosocial model proposed a reciprocal relationship: testosterone rises in anticipation of and after status contests, winning tends to raise it further and losing to lower it, and elevated testosterone in turn promotes dominance-seeking behavior (Mazur & Booth, 1998). The arrow runs both ways — status shapes hormones as much as hormones shape status — which is why testosterone is better understood as tracking competition than as a thermostat setting a person's rank.

The relationship is also conditional. The dual-hormone hypothesis holds that testosterone's association with dominance behavior depends on cortisol, the principal glucocorticoid of the stress axis: testosterone predicts dominance and status-seeking primarily when cortisol is low, and this coupling is blocked when cortisol is high (Mehta & Josephs, 2010). This interaction — not testosterone alone — has become the standard model for the endocrinology of dominance, and it is the relationship the third demonstration lets the reader probe. At the far end of the causal chain, chronic subordination itself carries physiological costs: Sapolsky's synthesis of primate and human work shows that the health consequences of low rank depend heavily on what a given rank means in a given society — how stable the hierarchy is, how much the subordinate is harassed, and what social support is available — rather than on rank as such (Sapolsky, 2005).

The third demonstration lets the reader set testosterone and cortisol independently and read off the predicted dominance-seeking tendency, making the gating interaction at the center of the dual-hormone hypothesis directly manipulable.

Group Dominance: Orientation and Theory

The individual-level story above concerns who rises within a group. A separate and equally developed tradition concerns dominance between groups. Social-dominance theory begins from the observation that surplus-producing human societies are organized as group-based hierarchies — along age, sex, and arbitrary-set lines such as ethnicity or class — and asks what psychological and institutional forces keep them that way (Sidanius et al., 2004). At its center is an individual-difference variable, social-dominance orientation (SDO): the degree to which a person desires and supports hierarchy among social groups and the dominance of some groups over others (Pratto et al., 1994).

SDO predicts a wide range of intergroup attitudes — political conservatism in some contexts, opposition to social-welfare and affirmative programs, nationalism, and generalized prejudice — and does so partly through the legitimizing myths people high in SDO tend to endorse: ideologies that make an existing hierarchy seem natural or deserved. The theory's broader claim is that hierarchy is maintained by the interplay of these orientations, discriminatory behavior at the individual and institutional levels, and the myths that rationalize both. It is important to see that SDO is conceptually distinct from the individual dominance strategies above: a person can be high in dispositional dominance without endorsing group-based hierarchy, and vice versa. The shared word marks a real family resemblance — both concern the ordering of social actors by rank — but the levels of analysis, the measures, and the explanatory targets are different.

Worked Example

Consider a newly formed project team of six people with no prior history, and ask how a stable influence ranking emerges from repeated interaction. We model this with the logic of the second demonstration. Each member has a latent dominance tendency and a latent prestige tendency, drawn independently; in each pairwise encounter, the probability that member i comes to outrank member j is a logistic function of the difference in their combined standing, where standing weights prestige and dominance. Suppose member A has prestige 0.8 and dominance 0.2, and member B has prestige 0.3 and dominance 0.7, and the group weights prestige and dominance equally (weight 0.5 each).

A's combined standing is 0.5 × 0.8 + 0.5 × 0.2 = 0.50. B's combined standing is 0.5 × 0.3 + 0.5 × 0.7 = 0.50. The two are evenly matched: with equal weighting, A's skill advantage exactly offsets B's coercion advantage, and the probability A outranks B is the logistic of zero, 1 / (1 + e⁻⁽⁰⁾) = 0.50. Now suppose the group is one that rewards demonstrated competence — a research lab rather than a street gang — and weights prestige 0.8, dominance 0.2. A's standing becomes 0.8 × 0.8 + 0.2 × 0.2 = 0.68; B's becomes 0.8 × 0.3 + 0.2 × 0.7 = 0.38. The difference is 0.30, and with a logistic steepness of 5 the probability that A outranks B rises to 1 / (1 + e⁻⁽⁵ ˣ ⁰·³⁰⁾) = 1 / (1 + e⁻¹·⁵) ≈ 0.82.

The same two people, unchanged in their individual tendencies, settle into opposite ranks depending only on what the group values. This is the core lesson of the dual-strategies account made quantitative: rank is a product of strategy and social context, not a fixed attribute of the person. The second demonstration lets the reader seed a group with varied dominance and prestige tendencies and watch a stable influence ranking settle out of repeated pairwise contests.

Discussion

The value of the dominance construct is also its hazard: one word knits together a dyadic behavioral asymmetry, a route to individual rank, a personality disposition, and the architecture of intergroup inequality. Keeping these levels distinct is the single most important interpretive discipline the literature demands. The behavioral-structural sense (who defers to whom) is the oldest and the one MeSH encodes; the dual-strategies sense (dominance versus prestige) is where contemporary individual-level research concentrates; the group sense (SDO and social-dominance theory) is a different research tradition with its own measures and its own debates.

The strongest throughline is that dominance, at every level, is relational and contextual rather than a fixed quantity residing in a person. A dominance relationship is defined by the deference it produces; the rank a strategy yields depends on what a group values; the behavioral effects of power depend on the goals it unleashes; the hormonal correlates of contest depend on the stress axis and on what a rank means locally. Even group-based dominance is maintained by an interplay of orientation, behavior, and ideology rather than by any one of them alone. A reader who leaves with the single generalization that dominance is a feature of relationships and situations, not of isolated individuals, will have the most defensible reading of a sprawling and sometimes contradictory literature.

Current Directions

Contemporary work is sharpening the dual-strategies account and probing its limits. Durkee, Lukaszewski, and Buss mapped the specific personal characteristics that confer status across many societies, finding that the traits predicting status are broadly consistent cross-culturally and that both dominance- and prestige-relevant attributes contribute, refining the claim that the two routes are universal (Durkee et al., 2020). Cheng's recent synthesis reviews how dominance and prestige each shape influence through partly distinct psychological channels, and where the two strategies interact rather than simply substitute (Cheng, 2020).

A second strand asks when subordinates and groups tolerate dominance. Kakkar and Sivanathan showed that under conditions of economic uncertainty people shift their preference toward dominant — rather than prestigious — leaders, a context-dependence that helps explain the rise of dominant figures in unstable times (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2017). Alongside this, the measurement of dominance displays has become more precise: Witkower and colleagues isolated the specific postural and facial cues that signal dominance as against prestige, allowing observers' rapid rank judgments to be decomposed into their perceptual components (Witkower et al., 2020). Open questions concern how the two strategies develop across the lifespan, how they interact with group-based dominance orientation, and how digital environments — where coercive and competence-based influence take new forms — reshape both routes to rank.

Common Misconceptions

Dominance means aggression.

A stable dominance hierarchy typically reduces overt aggression, because established deference removes the need to fight. Dominance is defined by the asymmetry of yielding, not by a rate of attack (de Waal, 1986).

High status just means being dominant.

Across human groups, much high standing is prestige — freely conferred respect for demonstrated skill — which is psychologically and behaviorally distinct from dominance and often a better predictor of durable influence (Cheng et al., 2013).

Testosterone determines who is dominant.

Testosterone tracks status contests reciprocally and its behavioral effect is gated by cortisol; it is a correlate and modulator of competition, not a fixed setter of rank (Mazur & Booth, 1998; Mehta & Josephs, 2010).

Social-dominance orientation is the same as being a dominant personality.

SDO is a preference for hierarchy between groups; it is conceptually and empirically separable from an individual's dispositional tendency to seek personal rank, and whether power turns prosocial or antisocial depends on the actor's goals and norms rather than corrupting automatically (Pratto et al., 1994; Keltner et al., 2003).

Key Researchers

Joey T. Cheng

(York University). Leading contemporary investigator of the dominance–prestige distinction, who provided much of the empirical evidence that the two strategies independently confer influence through different psychological channels. ORCID - Google Scholar - Faculty page

Joseph Henrich

(Harvard University). Co-author, with Francisco Gil-White, of the evolutionary theory distinguishing prestige from dominance as two routes to human social rank — the foundation of the dual-strategies account. Google Scholar - Faculty page - Wikidata

Dacher Keltner

(University of California, Berkeley). Author, with Gruenfeld and Anderson, of the approach/inhibition theory of power, which reframed power as a psychological state with reliable effects on emotion, cognition, and action. ORCID - Google Scholar - Faculty page - Wikidata

Felicia Pratto

(University of Connecticut). Co-developer, with Jim Sidanius, of social-dominance theory and lead author of the original social-dominance orientation scale, which operationalized the preference for group-based hierarchy and launched a large intergroup-relations literature. Google Scholar - Faculty page - Wikidata

Jim Sidanius

(1945–2021; formerly Harvard University). Co-originator of social-dominance theory, who integrated personality, intergroup, and institutional levels of analysis into a single account of how group-based hierarchies are produced and maintained. Google Scholar - Faculty page - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Jessica L. Tracy

(University of British Columbia). Experimental authority on the nonverbal expression of pride and status, whose work isolates the distinct postural and facial displays that signal dominance as against prestige. Google Scholar - Faculty page

Glossary

Approach system.

The behavioral activation tendency — toward rewards, action, and goal pursuit — that elevated power is theorized to engage, as against the inhibition and threat-vigilance characteristic of the powerless.

Biosocial model.

Mazur and Booth's account of a reciprocal relationship between testosterone and status, in which contests shape hormone levels and hormone levels in turn promote dominance-seeking.

Cortisol.

The principal glucocorticoid of the stress axis, whose level gates testosterone's association with dominance behavior in the dual-hormone hypothesis.

Deference.

The yielding of one individual to another — in access to resources, decisions, or attention — the patterned asymmetry from which a dominance relationship is inferred.

Dominance (strategy).

The attainment of rank by force and the threat of force — inducing fear, controlling needed resources, and imposing costs on the non-compliant.

Dominance hierarchy.

The group-level ordering that emerges when pairwise deference relationships are aggregated, often approximately linear and typically associated with reduced overt aggression once stable.

Dual-hormone hypothesis.

The proposal that testosterone predicts dominance and status-seeking primarily when cortisol is low, the coupling being blocked when cortisol is high.

Dual-strategies theory.

The account that humans attain social rank by two distinct routes, dominance and prestige, the second opened by the species' reliance on cultural learning.

Legitimizing myth.

An ideology that makes an existing group-based hierarchy appear natural or deserved, one of the mechanisms social-dominance theory holds to maintain intergroup inequality.

Power.

Asymmetric control over valued resources and outcomes; theorized to function as a psychological state with reliable effects on emotion, cognition, and action rather than as a mere position.

Prestige.

The attainment of rank by displaying valued skill or knowledge so that others freely choose to defer, attend, and copy, conferring status in exchange for proximity and learning.

Social dominance.

The patterned ordering of individuals and groups by their relative influence over contested resources, decisions, and one another's behavior.

Social-dominance orientation.

An individual-difference measure of the degree to which a person desires and supports hierarchy among social groups and the dominance of some groups over others.

Social-dominance theory.

The framework explaining how group-based hierarchies are produced and sustained through the interplay of orientation, discriminatory behavior, and legitimizing ideology.

Subordination.

The lower pole of a dominance relationship; chronic subordination carries physiological costs that depend on what a given rank means in its social context.

Testosterone.

The androgen most studied in relation to dominance; better understood as tracking status competition than as setting rank, and conditional on cortisol in its behavioral effect.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between dominance and prestige?

Both are routes to social rank, but dominance attains influence through coercion, intimidation, and the control of resources others need, whereas prestige attains it through demonstrated competence and the respect freely conferred by people who want to learn from or associate with the skilled individual. Group members defer to dominant individuals out of fear and to prestigious individuals out of admiration, and the two strategies have distinct emotional, postural, and attentional signatures (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Cheng et al., 2013).

Is a dominance hierarchy the same as constant fighting?

No; usually the opposite. A dominance hierarchy is defined by stable patterns of deference, and once it is established overt aggression typically declines, because subordinates yield without a contest. The structure persists precisely because it makes fighting unnecessary (de Waal, 1986).

Does testosterone make a person dominant?

Testosterone is better described as tracking status competition than as setting rank. It rises around contests and shifts with winning and losing, and its association with dominance behavior holds mainly when cortisol is low (the dual-hormone hypothesis), so it is a conditional modulator of competitive behavior, not a fixed determinant of who is dominant (Mazur & Booth, 1998; Mehta & Josephs, 2010).

How does having power change the way people think?

Elevated power tends to activate approach-related tendencies: the powerful act more readily, attend more to rewards and goals, experience more positive affect, and sometimes attend less to others' perspectives, while the powerless are more vigilant to threat and more attentive to the powerful. These are effects of disinhibition and goal pursuit, and whether they turn prosocial or antisocial depends on the actor's goals and norms (Keltner et al., 2003; Magee & Galinsky, 2008).

What is social-dominance orientation?

Social-dominance orientation (SDO) is an individual-difference measure of how much a person prefers and supports hierarchy among social groups and the dominance of some groups over others. It predicts a range of intergroup attitudes, including opposition to egalitarian policies and generalized prejudice, and is a central variable in social-dominance theory (Pratto et al., 1994).

Is social-dominance orientation the same as having a dominant personality?

No. SDO concerns a preference for hierarchy between groups, whereas a dominant personality concerns an individual's tendency to seek personal rank within a group. The two are conceptually and empirically distinct; a person can score high on one and low on the other (Pratto et al., 1994; Sidanius et al., 2004).

When do groups prefer dominant leaders over prestigious ones?

Preference shifts with context. Under conditions of economic uncertainty and threat, people move toward favoring dominant leaders over prestigious ones, which helps explain why coercive, controlling figures gain support in unstable times (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2017).

Does low social rank harm health?

It can, but the effect depends heavily on what a given rank means in a given social context rather than on rank itself. The stability of the hierarchy, how much subordinates are harassed, and the availability of social support all shape whether low rank carries physiological costs, as comparative work across primate and human societies shows (Sapolsky, 2005).

References