Abstract
Objectives
Despite the aversion to inequality in humans, social hierarchies are a fundamental feature of their social life. Several mechanisms help explain the prevalence of hierarchies over egalitarianism. Recent work has suggested that while people tend to reduce resource inequalities when given the opportunity, they are reluctant to do so when it results in a reversal of social ranks (Xie et al., 2017). In this study, we explore how the way in which hierarchies are established influences this mechanism. We propose that aversion to rank reversal depends on whether rank asymmetry is fair or unfair.
Methods
In an online study, participants read 12 vignettes depicting six hypothetical hierarchies that varied in fairness. In each vignette, one individual was endowed with more resources than another individual, and participants could reduce that inequality by transferring resources from the higher-ranked individual to the lower-ranked one. In half of the vignettes, reducing the inequality led to a reversal of ranks, while in the other half it did not.
Results
We observed that participants were more likely to reverse ranks and reduce inequality when the hierarchy was perceived as unfair.
Conclusion
Overall, our results suggest that considerations of fairness guide participants’ in their decision to reverse ranks.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon request.
References
Anderson, C., Hildreth, J. A. D., & Howland, L. (2015). Is the desire for status a fundamental human motive? A review of the empirical literature. Psychological bulletin, 141(3), 574
Bechtel, M. M., Liesch, R., & Scheve, K. F. (2018). Inequality and redistribution behavior in a give-or-take game. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(14), 3611–3616
Boehm, C. (1993). Egalitarian behavior and reverse dominance hierarchy.Current Anthropology, 34(3)
Bolton, G. E., Brandts, J., & Ockenfels, A. (2005). Fair procedures: Evidence from games involving lotteries. The Economic Journal, 115(506), 1054–1076
Burns, M., & Sommerville, J. (2014). “I pick you”: The impact of fairness and race on infants’ selection of social partners. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. https://www.frontiersin.org/article/https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00093
Buyukozer Dawkins, M., Sloane, S., & Baillargeon, R. (2019). Do Infants in the First Year of Life Expect Equal Resource Allocations? Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://www.frontiersin.org/article/https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00116
Charafeddine, R., Mercier, H., Clément, F., Kaufmann, L., Reboul, A., & Van der Henst, J. B. (2016). Children’s allocation of resources in social dominance situations. Developmental Psychology, 52(11), 1843–1857. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000164
Cheng, J. T., & Tracy, J. L. (2014). Toward a unified science of hierarchy: Dominance and prestige are two fundamental pathways to human social rank. The psychology of social status (pp. 3–27). Springer
Cheng, N., Wan, Y., An, J., Gummerum, M., & Zhu, L. (2021). Power grabbed or granted: Children’s allocation of resources in social power situations. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 210, 105192
Dawes, C. T., Fowler, J. H., Johnson, T., McElreath, R., & Smirnov, O. (2007). Egalitarian motives in humans. nature, 446(7137), 794–796
Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Buchner, A., & Lang, A. G. (2009). Statistical power analyses using G*Power 3.1: Tests for correlation and regression analyses. Behavior Research Methods, 41, 1149–1160
Feather, N. T. (1994). Attitudes toward high achievers and reactions to their fall: Theory and research concerning tall poppies. Advances in experimental social psychology (26 vol., pp. 1–73). Elsevier
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2004). Third-party punishment and social norms. Evolution and human behavior, 25(2), 63–87
Fehr, E., & Schmidt, K. M. (1999). A theory of fairness, competition, and cooperation. The quarterly journal of economics, 114(3), 817–868
Fischer, R., Hanke, K., & Sibley, C. G. (2012). Cultural and institutional determinants of social dominance orientation: A cross-cultural meta-analysis of 27 societies. Political Psychology, 33(4), 437–467
Fiske, A. P. (1992). The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations. Psychological review, 99(4), 689–723
Halevy, N., Chou, Y., E., & Galinsky, D., A (2011). A functional model of hierarchy: Why, how, and when vertical differentiation enhances group performance. Organizational Psychology Review, 1(1), 32–52
Hamann, K., Warneken, F., Greenberg, J. R., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Collaboration encourages equal sharing in children but not in chimpanzees. Nature, 476(7360), 328–331
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and brain sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83
Henrich, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., Cardenas, J. C., Gurven, M., Gwako, E., & Henrich, N. (2006). Costly punishment across human societies. Science, 312(5781), 1767–1770
Huppert, E., Cowell, J. M., Cheng, Y., Contreras-Ibáñez, C., Gomez-Sicard, N., Gonzalez-Gadea, M. L., Huepe, D., Ibanez, A., Lee, K., & Mahasneh, R. (2019). The development of children’s preferences for equality and equity across 13 individualistic and collectivist cultures. Developmental science, 22(2), e12729
Jost, J. T., & Banaji, M. R. (1994). The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology, 33(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.1994.tb01008.x
Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology, 25(6), 881–919
Kajanus, A., Afshordi, N., & Warneken, F. (2020). Children’s understanding of dominance and prestige in China and the UK. Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(1), 23–34
Kiatpongsan, S., & Norton, M. I. (2014). How much (more) should CEOs make? A universal desire for more equal pay. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(6), 587–593
Kimbrough, E. O., Sheremeta, R. M., & Shields, T. W. (2014). When parity promotes peace: Resolving conflict between asymmetric agents. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 99, 96–108
Kim, J., Allison, S. T., Eylon, D., Goethals, G. R., Markus, M. J., Hindle, S. M., & McGuire, H. A. (2008). Rooting for (and then abandoning) the underdog. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38(10), 2550–2573
Loewenstein, G. F., Thompson, L., & Bazerman, M. H. (1989). Social utility and decision making in interpersonal contexts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(3), 426–441. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.3.426
Lucca, K., Pospisil, J., & Sommerville, J. A. (2018). Fairness informs social decision making in infancy. PLOS ONE, 13(2), e0192848. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0192848
Magee, J. C., & Galinsky, A. D. (2008). 8 social hierarchy: The self-reinforcing nature of power and status. Academy of Management annals, 2(1), 351–398
Mascaro, O., & Csibra, G. (2012). Representation of stable social dominance relations by human infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(18), 6862–6867. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1113194109
Meristo, M., Strid, K., & Surian, L. (2016). Preverbal infants’ ability to encode the outcome of distributive actions. Infancy, 21(3), 353–372
Norton, M. I., Neal, D. T., Govan, C. L., Ariely, D., & Holland, E. (2014). The not-so-common-wealth of Australia: Evidence for a cross-cultural desire for a more equal distribution of wealth.Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy
Palan, S., & Schitter, C. (2018). Prolific. Ac—A subject pool for online experiments. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 17, 22–27
Pratto, F., Sidanius, J., Stallworth, L. M., & Malle, B. F. (1994). Social dominance orientation: A personality variable predicting social and political attitudes. Journal of personality and social psychology, 67(4), 741–763
Pun, A., Birch, S. A., & Baron, A. S. (2016). Infants use relative numerical group size to infer social dominance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(9), 2376–2381
R. Core Team (2018). Package “Stats.”The R Stats Package, https://www.R-project.org
Schäfer, M., Haun, D. B., & Tomasello, M. (2015). Fair is not fair everywhere. Psychological science, 26(8), 1252–1260
Schmid Mast, M. (2004). Men are hierarchical, women are egalitarian: An implicit gender stereotype. Swiss Journal of Psychology/Schweizerische Zeitschrift Für Psychologie/Revue Suisse de Psychologie, 63(2), 107
Shaw, A., Montinari, N., Piovesan, M., Olson, K. R., Gino, F., & Norton, M. I. (2014). Children develop a veil of fairness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 363
Shaw, A., & Olson, K. (2014). Fairness as partiality aversion: The development of procedural justice. Journal of experimental child psychology, 119, 40–53
Sidanius, J., Pratto, F., & Bobo, L. (1994). Social dominance orientation and the political psychology of gender: A case of invariance? Journal of personality and social psychology, 67(6), 998
Sidanius, J., Sinclair, S., & Pratto, F. (2006). Social Dominance Orientation, Gender, and Increasing Educational Exposure 1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 36(7), 1640–1653
Starmans, C., Sheskin, M., & Bloom, P. (2017). Why people prefer unequal societies. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(4), 1–7
Thomsen, L., Frankenhuis, W. E., Ingold-Smith, M. C., & Carey, S. (2011). Big and mighty: Preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance. Science, 331(6016), 477–480
Tomasello, M., & Vaish, A. (2013). Origins of human cooperation and morality. Annual review of psychology, 64(1), 231–255
Ulber, J., Hamann, K., & Tomasello, M. (2017). Young children, but not chimpanzees, are averse to disadvantageous and advantageous inequities. Journal of experimental child psychology, 155, 48–66
Van Berkel, L., Crandall, C. S., Eidelman, S., & Blanchar, J. C. (2015). Hierarchy, dominance, and deliberation: Egalitarian values require mental effort. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(9), 1207–1222
Van Rossum, G., & Drake, F. L. (2009). Manual-Python 3. CreateSpace
Vandello, J. A., Goldschmied, N. P., & Richards, D. A. (2007). The appeal of the underdog. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(12), 1603–1616
von Rueden, C. (2020). Making and unmaking egalitarianism in small-scale human societies. Current opinion in psychology, 33, 167–171
Xie, W., Ho, B., Meier, S., & Zhou, X. (2017). Rank reversal aversion inhibits redistribution across societies. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(8), 1–5
Zitek, E. M., & Tiedens, L. Z. (2012). The fluency of social hierarchy: The ease with which hierarchical relationships are seen, remembered, learned, and liked. Journal of personality and social psychology, 102(1), 98–115
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
On behalf of all authors, the corresponding authors state that there is no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Electronic Supplementary Material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Foncelle, A., Barat, E., Dreher, JC. et al. Rank Reversal Aversion and Fairness in Hierarchies. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology 8, 520–537 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-022-00206-7
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-022-00206-7