hirhome | This paper advances an ``information goods'' theory that explains
prestige processes as an emergent product of psychological adaptations
that evolved to improve the quality of information acquired via
cultural transmission. Natural selection favored social learners who
could evaluate potential models and copy the most successful among
them. In order to improve the fidelity and comprehensiveness of such
ranked-biased copying, social learners further evolved dispositions to
sycophantically ingratiate themselves with their chosen models, so as
to gain close proximity to, and prolonged interaction with, these
models. Once common, these dispositions created, at the group level,
distributions of deference that new entrants may adaptively exploit to
decide who to begin copying. This generated a preference for models who
seem generally ``popular.'' Building on social exchange theories, we
argue that a wider range of phenomena associated with prestige
processes can more plausibly be explained by this simple theory than by
others, and we test its predictions with data from throughout the
social sciences. In addition, we distinguish carefully between
dominance (force or force threat) and prestige (freely conferred
deference).
