April 8, 2022 • 26 mins
Why do we form social hierarchies?
From corporate ladders to military chains of command, formal caste systems to playground pecking orders, humans are particularly sensitive to social status. And we display our rank in all sorts of ways, even without realizing it - through our posture, vocal pitch, and patterns of eye contact.
Join Dessa to learn how social hierarchies are formed, how they might be dismantled, and the many ways in which they color our daily exchanges.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Before becoming a musician, I worked as a face painter,
sometimes dressed as a butterfly, sometimes wearing shiny red boots
and pigtails, decked out in holographic robbins. I did it
for roughly ten years. It was pretty good at it.
I paid well as a freelance gig, mostly company parties,
and being a face painter is like serving as an
embedded spy in the republic of childhood. Kids speak freely
(00:28):
around you, don't even register you're an adult. They're sweet,
they're weird, they're funny, they're mean, and even though they're
pint sized, they're already real sensitive to social status and hierarchy.
I remember this one kid, let's call him Charlemagne, pulling
ranked on another boy by explaining that his dad worked
in a corner office. And I kept painting. But it
(00:50):
occurred to me that this kid would have no idea
why a corner office was even desirable. He hadn't spent
any time in his sunless cubicle, yet he just heard
the boast at home and trotted it out. Here is
evidence that Charlemagne Sr. Was higher up on the corporate
ladder than this other kid, who was also waiting in
line for me to paint a glitter batman on his cheek.
(01:14):
I'm Dessa. This is deeply human, and we're talking about
social status, prestige, influence and dominance, and our personal lives
and our work lives and our societies at large. Why
do we form social hierarchies. We're born into the many
hierarchy of our homes. We're parents of the de facto bosses.
(01:35):
And as a little kid myself, I was very eager
to level the family organizational chart, constantly campaigning my mom
for an equal vote in domestic policy decisions. Let's all
just are your case and trust the best plans will
rise to the top. And I cannot tell you how
much I hated her reply, I'm your mother, not your friend.
(01:56):
I hate that now. I hate saying that now. But
when I was five and a half years old, Maxie
was born, promoting me to middle management halfway around the world.
A few years later, a little girl named Shenyang was
born into a very different family, and when she was
(02:17):
about five, she spent a night wrapped in her grandfather's
coat hiding from a government raid. They came at night,
and I was really scared because my Grandpa took me
to the top of the roof and we were hiding there,
and that was one of the horrible scenes in my childhood.
They flipped to my grandparents bed. They flipped it because
(02:40):
they thought I were hiding underneath the bed. Of course
they don't know my dame. They're just saying, where's the kid?
Where's the kid? When you hear a kid, of course
you are scared. Okay, let's get the context that led
to that scene on the roof. Can I ask you
where year you were born? January the one I was
(03:00):
born in Shandong, Jining, a small city, And if somebody
was picturing China on a map, it's in B two
in Beijing and Shanghai. And did you have siblings when
you grew up? Uh? That's usually an innocent, getting to
know you kind of question, But for Shen Young, it's
(03:20):
complicated because legally she was not allowed to have siblings.
By the mid eighties, China had a strict one child policy.
Each couple was permitted only one kid and would face
serious fines for any additional births. But Chanyang was the
second of four girls. My grandma used to say, Guanti
and Guandi guan. You control the heaven, you control the earth.
(03:44):
You cannot control people's belly. But the government did try
to control pregnancies. It launched huge propaganda campaigns to dissuade
couples from having what we're called excess birth children. And
the slogans were really really intense. One x as birth
and the whole village gets their tubs tied. They're not
just threatening, they're really taking people to get their tubes tied. Literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(04:09):
some villages really did that. Girls were more likely to
be aborted, abandoned, or given away during those years. Boys
who could carry on the family line recorded higher status.
Boys have to have all the privileges. They are like
the spoilt light of the family. At dinner table, boys
always get to eat chicken legs, so you know, the
(04:32):
meat the boy gets to eat first. There are many
families in the countryside that the sisters sacrifice themselves not
to go to school, but they go to work so
they can pay the tuition for the brother. To enforce
the one child rule, government officials raided homes if they
found an excess birth child. They could demolish the house,
(04:55):
take the family's furniture, food, or even the baby itself.
Chan Yang's parents, who kept trying for a boy after
she was born, sent her to live in a village
with her grandparents to hide. They didn't file any paperwork
to register her birth, but as we've heard, the authorities
found her grandparents house and they came looking for her.
(05:15):
To evade them, n Young was then sent to an aunt,
far away from any family that she knew. She was
scrappy and strong willed, but she was essentially a five
year old fugitive in hiding and undocumented in her own country.
People used to call me latle black child. Yes, we
also have black children. It means we illegal children, and
(05:38):
they mobbed me for all. She's the little black girl
from Shandong Province. The term black children wasn't associated with
skin color. It was a comment about Shen Yan's position
in the social hierarchy. She wasn't only perceived as inferior
like there wasn't even a proper wrong for her. She
wasn't supposed to exist at all. We were like the
invisible generation, the ghost child. But like many other excess
(06:01):
birth children, Shen Young found a way to hack back
onto the grid and reinserting herself into the social order
would involve assuming a new identity. Shen young story will
provide a dramatic example of how status and leverage and
authority can affect a human life. But all of us
are sensitive even to the minor differences in power dynamics
(06:24):
that surround us within the first ten, fifteen, twenty seconds,
Like people already know what is the status situation in
this room. That's Dr Joey Cheng, sociologist at RK University
in Toronto, Canada. When we first enter a room, were
likely to rely on demographic shorthand guessing who's in control
(06:45):
based on age and race and gender. Then you start
paying attention right as people speak, to their body language,
to their non verbal cues. So you know, is this
person sitting up right? Are they expanded? Do they look
like they're taking up a lot of space? Being extroverted
is big, especially in North American culture. So there's even
(07:05):
this thing called the Babbler effect where the person who
speaks the most is the one who's likely to be
a leader in a room. Joey worked on a study
that also found we tend to spend more time looking
at the high status individuals in a group, but we
may have read our gaze if they look directly back
at us in a subtle sign of submission. We take
(07:28):
note of how others speak as well. Are they lowering
the pitch of their voice as they speak? Then studies
we find that when you measure the pitch of people's
voice when they first speak compared to how it changes
over time, the people who lower their voice they actually
get seen as more dominant and they end up having
(07:51):
more influence over a group. So when you think about,
you know, when we're in trouble, right, how do people
call our names? This stuff am to more than just
academic trivia. Judicial researchers have investigated why some jurors seem
to hold outsized influence on jury deliberations. Former British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher hired a speech coach to help her
(08:13):
lower her pitch to create a more authoritative presence, and
Joey herself notes that when hierarchical cues are built into
the language, they might even affect our intimate relationships. So
I think of the informal too in Spanish versus the formal.
THID languages like Thai and Japanese have many complicated levels
of deference and respect. Apparently even for Japanese speakers, like
(08:39):
kids growing up in Japan, that is a tricky thing
they have to learn to as they grow up. Is
like okay for this person, is this a context where
I use that hierarchical language or is this not? And
also it gets complicated after people get married. They kind
of the figure out like all right, do I start
using cago, which that hiwardic language with my in laws
(09:01):
or do I drop it? Like it's tricky. You contributed
a chapter to this book called Towards a Unified Science
of Hierarchy, and essentially you wrote that having an organizational
structure in a hierarchical form was a tool to resolve conflict.
Whereas I think right now in the modern world, we
(09:22):
imagine like hierarchies as the source of a lot of conflict.
Can you explain when you show submission that is a
way to prevent conflict in the absence of that hierarchy
while figuring out somebody's going to get hurt. So think
about like in a workplace meetings. Right when your assistant,
(09:45):
for instance, knows they're your assistant, you're not going to
be butting heads with them. It's like if you had
to remind them that they're your assistant because they've somehow forgotten,
then that's where you might have issues. Why and how
does some people land higher than others in the social hierarchy.
Scholars like Joey identify two classic strategies to achieve or
(10:10):
maintain a high status position. The first is dominance. Dominance
refers to the use of threat and intimidation to gain
influence over others, typically by instilling fear. Does it have
to be physical? It doesn't. So when your boss says
to you, you're not getting that raise next time, if
(10:30):
you're not going to work extra hours this weekend, or
you might even think of parents who you know when
you're threatening your kid that you're going to ground them.
So the implied threat often in humans that tends to
be verbal, right, but that is nevertheless still a form
of dominance. The second strategy to achieve status is prestige.
That's where you earn respect and influence based on your
(10:52):
skills and talents. So when my mom was sternly reminding
me I'm your mother, not your friend, she was flexing eminence.
Whereas when I proposed that we discussed the bedtime protocols.
I was hoping to be judged on my merit and
awarded some prestige. All human communities form hierarchies, and on
(11:13):
this we turned to Dr Zach Garfield, behavioral scientist and
evolutionary anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Study and to
Lose France. He says that even in hunter gatherers societies
that might not have fixed rules like chieftain people don't
live together as complete equals, there are still leaders still
varying levels of status. The hierarchy is just more dynamic.
(11:36):
Social influence might be more often based on just individual
capacities and the context. So what are we doing now?
Are we trying to clear feel? Are we trying to hunt?
Do we have a problem that needs to be resolved?
Who can best coordinate this collective action dilemma? And whoever
it kind of is there and can get the job
done might be chosen as a leader. Every culture operates
by its own rules, but there are some patterns to
(11:57):
how societies organize themselves. Cultures that developed in environments where
food and resources are plentiful tend to form more rigid
and stratified hierarchies. This trend can be seen, for example,
in some of the Native American societies of the Pacific Northwest.
The classic example is the northwest coast of North America,
where you have salmon runs. Many populations in the Northwest
(12:21):
coast did practice institutionalized slavery both before and after European colonization.
Some native tribes enslaved people and forced them into lives
of labor. Some form of lightered social order is observable
in every human society, and in non human ones too.
(12:41):
The term pecking order, for example, This coined just over
a hundred years ago by a Norwegian researcher studying chickens.
He noted, there are no two individual birds of any
given species which, when living together, did not know which
of the two has precedents and which is subordinate. I
have a shape in my head for high archy, like
I'm imagining like a pyramid. Is that what you imagine
(13:04):
or do you have like a totally different shape. I
think the pyramid is not a bad way to conceptualize.
It's just that there's going to be many pyramids, all
inside of each other at the same time, along different axis. Right,
It's like a rubics cut pyramid in your head. Yeah,
it's like a erubics creup pyramid. Yeah, and I've just
got a child's drawing of a triangle on a white
sheet of paper. Hierarchies can overlap their complex and though
(13:27):
they can sometimes be oppressive, they also help us get
a ton of stuff done. One clear advantage of hierarchies
is they help us coordinate as a group to achieve
some what we often call collective action. And humans, like
many other social species, Like all social species, we need
to live in a group. We can't survive on our own.
We can't consume enough calories on our own, we can't
raise our children on our own. We generally can't be
(13:49):
happy on our own. So we were bound to this
group living physiologically and psychologically. Lots of evidence suggests that
social hierarchies allow us to coordinate groups have been the
angels with non completely overlapping interests in a more effective way.
(14:16):
Hierarchies are clutched when a bunch of us try to
pull off something big. Listening to Zach reminded me of
a filmmaker friend, Lucian, who directed a music video for
one of my singles, and it was like this last minute,
little budget thing elusion wrote in a couple of film
friends to crew and their girlfriends generously agreed to help,
and we plan to like right around shopping carts at
a parking lot while lipstick totally goofy. But as soon
(14:39):
as the cameras started speeding, Lucian stops using people's names,
Like when he needs something, he just tails them by
their role on set p A or I see or gather,
and to them, this is clearly totally normal. When I
asked him about it later, he laughed and said he
forgot how weird that might look from the outside, but
that the rigid structure was actually part of what attracted
(15:00):
at him to film in the first place. It provides
order to this big community of freelance artists and technicians
that need to perform their jobs essentially interchangeably, and film
is a relatively new medium, he reminded me, so that
strict hierarchy just sort of emerged to make it all possible.
But yes, it was funny when he thought about it,
that he was shouting PA to get the attention of
(15:21):
the woman that he'd be going home with later. On
a proper movie set, people might be hoping to be
recognized for their skills and then promoted on the next
shoot the assistant director with an eye on the director's chair.
All individuals compete for status, pursue some social influence or
some social rank. We all can't strive to be the
next Lebron James. We know we all can't strive to
(15:42):
be the next nuclear physicist. But everyone can find some
domain in which they can compete for status. And I
think that is a universal feature of who we are.
Why just built in, like, what is this appetite for status?
So by finding some domain in which we can develop
some expertise, it makes you a valuable social partner. I'm
just gonna allow you to develop that social capital. And
(16:02):
if you can do that, then you'll be more likely
to survive, have greater well being survived, and reproduce. So
I think that's part of it. The motive to form
hierarchies maybe universal, but as we've heard, the resultant structures
look really different around the world. One of the most
formalized institutional versions of social stratification is the cast system
(16:25):
of South Asia. I'm aside that many economists and Ashoka University.
When you meet someone on the street, can you tell
immediately what cast that prison is from. No, you cannot.
For example, in urban India, you get into the metro
commuter train and you would not be able to tell
(16:45):
looking at people which costs they belong to. Absolutely not.
A Shweeny lives in Delhi and she wrote a book
called The Grammar of Cast. There isn't a straightforward counterpart
for cast in the West. It's not quite like race
or class, though there are overlaps. Cast is something you're
born into, something that can't be changed, even if your
(17:07):
circumstances do like blood type. And there are thousands of
jetty or individual cast designations, and historically each was linked
to a particular vocation priest or warrior, builder, farmer. The
system is ancient, but it's very much survived in modern India,
even if it functions less visibly than it used to.
A lot of contemporary modern occupations have no cost counterpart.
(17:32):
There is no cost of dentists or rocket scientists or
nuclear scientists, graphic designers, so if you want to encountered
a graphic designer, you wouldn't know what costs they belonged to.
But it still matters. Families aim to marry within their
own cast, and when people apply for jobs, private employers
try to suss out the cast of the applicants. The
system is culturally pervasive in South Asia. Some Muslim and
(17:54):
Christian communities and that part of the world have cast structures.
But the philosophical roots of the system connect to the
religious concept of reincarnation. And so what you are today
it must be because you're either being rewarded for being
good in the past life of you are being punished
for being bad in the past life. It's got my
basically in that world view, it would then follow that
(18:14):
the people born into the most empoverished and disrespected casts
somehow deserve it. The most severe consequences of the system
are born by those that were historically regarded as untouchable.
Untouchability is a set of practices that deems any interaction
with a certain group of people polluting. If they had
(18:38):
to cross the street in the village, they would have
to take their shoes off if they were wearing any
shoes at all, so that their footwear doesn't pollute the grounds, etcetera, etcetera.
So it was the most degrading experience of living. What
is the source of that? It's the occupations that these
groups were doing so basically everything that deals with dead
(18:58):
animals or per sins or excreta of any bodily fluid
things that are literally dirty. All of those occupations were
considered untouchable because these occupations were considered impure. But India's
Constitution of nineteen change that untouchability has been deemed illegal
(19:19):
in independent India. Well on paper itegal, but many, many
people still practice untouchability. Discrimination is rampant, unapologetic, and totally
over it. A teacher might send an untouchable boy to
sit behind in the class and say, what are you
doing here? You know you're going to grow up and
become a sweeper. Why do you need to get educated?
(19:40):
There is documentary evidence where students who belong to untouchable groups,
boys and girls, are made to clean toilets, a job
that janitors in school should be doing, not children. Members
of casts that were considered untouchable often call themselves dallets,
which means oppressed, and it's a term of pride. But
evidence of the continued depression is everywhere. Often on roadside
(20:04):
stalls that sell t you will see that there are
two kinds of tumblers kept there. There are some inferior tumblers,
and everybody knows that these tumblers are for the formerly
untouchable groups, and someone breaking the unstated codes risks violence.
He could just get beaten up. It happens literally every day.
(20:25):
So cast based violence is all pervasive for forgetting your
place in society, and sexual violence against the women by
upper cast men is also a way of showing the
lists where they belong. You better not forget your position,
otherwise will humiliate your women. Today, dalets are organizing campaigning
(20:49):
for fair treatment, building a dalt middle class, which of
course comes with its own resentments and complications. Do you
think the caste system reveals something about out human nature,
not just about India or South Asia. Yeah, many of
us benefit from inequality, and whether we are consciously aware
(21:10):
of that or not, we wouldn't be desperate to change
the system that would take away many of our benefits.
It may not happen in my lifetime, but hopefully, you know,
we will see strives to us day equality. Back to Chenyang,
(21:30):
the second or four daughters who grew up hidden from
the authorities, big changes would in fact happen in her lifetime,
but will rejoin her story where we left it when
shen Yang was a little girl, so in my family
household registration, I don't exist. To attend school, however, children
needed a household registration document, so the aunt and uncle
(21:51):
that chen Yang was living with I bought the document
from a distant relative named wun Ying, as she herself
was buying someone else's a document that would register her
in a big city, which would give her more opportunities
in her own education. To use wun Yang's papers, shen
Yang had to pretend the details written on it were
her own, including her age and birthday. They changed my
(22:14):
birthday to night four, so by law and miss Huang's
niece and I don't have parents, shen Yan's teachers called
her by the other girl's name in school. When she
got a driver's license, it was printed with the other
girl's name, and when she was married, the other girl's
birthday was read out loud at the wedding. And Shenyong
started to write a book about what her life has
(22:36):
been like as an excess child. And none of us
tell our own life stories with academic terms like elevated
social rank. But shen Yang's position in the social hierarchy
does look different now. There were people who used to
look down upon me. You want to publish a book?
Who do you think you are? Status is so often
(22:57):
informed by old forces and actors ideas about class, race, gender.
But this strange rule that's so defined Shen Young's position
in society was enacted only a few years before she
was born, and then it evaporated in the government started
to relax the one child policy, and then last year
(23:20):
two thousand twenty one, on May the thirty one, the
government released the New Potter City allow every couple to
have three children. How is your status different now the
one child policy is over. You live in a big city.
You have published a super rad book that has been
translated into at least one other language. People think, oh,
she's a writer now, because before I was nobody. I
(23:42):
don't want to be famous. I just want to tell
a story that is worth teddy. But of course, no
shift in policy can retroactively revise a childhood and a
comment she read online particularly resonated with Chenille. Once the
New Potter says out the sky I off Guangjo has
stuned our som immediately, and it's really havin It's the
(24:05):
tears of the eighties and Manetes generation. Human hierarchies help
us collaborate on goals we'd never be able to achieve
on our own. They can also minimize conflict by establishing
clear roles and expectations, and of course, sometimes they can
(24:27):
simply help people in powers stay that way at the
expense of those without the means to topple the pyramid.
Our hierarchical rules are sometimes codified boss versus assistant, mother
versus friend, and sometimes they're fluid. The homie whom majored
in film studies gets to pick the movie. The foodie
picks the place to order in. I am technically writing
(24:48):
this in my own corner office, but only that I
am sitting in a corner of my apartment, and wherever
I am working is functionally rendered an office. Now, when
I think back on that kid bragging about a dad,
it's a little bit more sympathy. We're all, in some sense,
little Charlotte Magne's and Charlie Mindy's trying to earn some respect,
so we've got something to offer. The trick is to
(25:10):
eke out some space for yourself without pushing someone else overboard.
Years ago, after the death of a family friend, rocked
my world pretty hard. I went to India and stood
for a long time at the burning gods, watching the
recently dead be incinerated in the open air by carefully
tended fires. And I loved India. The beauty and the
(25:31):
drama move me. Staring into the fires, I was brought
back to myself by a man. I hadn't heard. Approach
you know cast, he asked. I told him that I did,
and he explained he was a dom, a member of
the untouchable cast that for generations and generations lit the
funeral pyres. The low cast bodies were burned right on
(25:52):
the sand, he explained, but where the high cast ones
were burned, they could afford sandalwood. And he gestured for
me to inhale deep to note how good the high
cast fires smell. When we parted, we were both covered
in a fine layer of ash, partly the remains of
the deceased and status as sandal would perfume still rising
(26:13):
from the fires. Deeply Human is a BBC World Service
and American Public media co production with I Heart Media.
It's hosted by me Jessa. Find me online at Tessa
on Instagram and Dussa Darling on Twitter Next time, I'm
(26:37):
deeply human. We're talking about all your stuff, about the
human impulse to acquire, collect even horde. Is that impulse
driven by modern marketing or by older, deeper forces. Meet
me at the junk drawer for our next little chat
Before becoming a musician, I worked as a face painter,
sometimes dressed as a butterfly, sometimes wearing shiny red boots
and pigtails, decked out in holographic robbins. I did it
for roughly ten years. It was pretty good at it.
I paid well as a freelance gig, mostly company parties,
and being a face painter is like serving as an
embedded spy in the republic of childhood. Kids speak freely
(00:28):
around you, don't even register you're an adult. They're sweet,
they're weird, they're funny, they're mean, and even though they're
pint sized, they're already real sensitive to social status and hierarchy.
I remember this one kid, let's call him Charlemagne, pulling
ranked on another boy by explaining that his dad worked
in a corner office. And I kept painting. But it
(00:50):
occurred to me that this kid would have no idea
why a corner office was even desirable. He hadn't spent
any time in his sunless cubicle, yet he just heard
the boast at home and trotted it out. Here is
evidence that Charlemagne Sr. Was higher up on the corporate
ladder than this other kid, who was also waiting in
line for me to paint a glitter batman on his cheek.
(01:14):
I'm Dessa. This is deeply human, and we're talking about
social status, prestige, influence and dominance, and our personal lives
and our work lives and our societies at large. Why
do we form social hierarchies. We're born into the many
hierarchy of our homes. We're parents of the de facto bosses.
(01:35):
And as a little kid myself, I was very eager
to level the family organizational chart, constantly campaigning my mom
for an equal vote in domestic policy decisions. Let's all
just are your case and trust the best plans will
rise to the top. And I cannot tell you how
much I hated her reply, I'm your mother, not your friend.
(01:56):
I hate that now. I hate saying that now. But
when I was five and a half years old, Maxie
was born, promoting me to middle management halfway around the world.
A few years later, a little girl named Shenyang was
born into a very different family, and when she was
(02:17):
about five, she spent a night wrapped in her grandfather's
coat hiding from a government raid. They came at night,
and I was really scared because my Grandpa took me
to the top of the roof and we were hiding there,
and that was one of the horrible scenes in my childhood.
They flipped to my grandparents bed. They flipped it because
(02:40):
they thought I were hiding underneath the bed. Of course
they don't know my dame. They're just saying, where's the kid?
Where's the kid? When you hear a kid, of course
you are scared. Okay, let's get the context that led
to that scene on the roof. Can I ask you
where year you were born? January the one I was
(03:00):
born in Shandong, Jining, a small city, And if somebody
was picturing China on a map, it's in B two
in Beijing and Shanghai. And did you have siblings when
you grew up? Uh? That's usually an innocent, getting to
know you kind of question, But for Shen Young, it's
(03:20):
complicated because legally she was not allowed to have siblings.
By the mid eighties, China had a strict one child policy.
Each couple was permitted only one kid and would face
serious fines for any additional births. But Chanyang was the
second of four girls. My grandma used to say, Guanti
and Guandi guan. You control the heaven, you control the earth.
(03:44):
You cannot control people's belly. But the government did try
to control pregnancies. It launched huge propaganda campaigns to dissuade
couples from having what we're called excess birth children. And
the slogans were really really intense. One x as birth
and the whole village gets their tubs tied. They're not
just threatening, they're really taking people to get their tubes tied. Literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(04:09):
some villages really did that. Girls were more likely to
be aborted, abandoned, or given away during those years. Boys
who could carry on the family line recorded higher status.
Boys have to have all the privileges. They are like
the spoilt light of the family. At dinner table, boys
always get to eat chicken legs, so you know, the
(04:32):
meat the boy gets to eat first. There are many
families in the countryside that the sisters sacrifice themselves not
to go to school, but they go to work so
they can pay the tuition for the brother. To enforce
the one child rule, government officials raided homes if they
found an excess birth child. They could demolish the house,
(04:55):
take the family's furniture, food, or even the baby itself.
Chan Yang's parents, who kept trying for a boy after
she was born, sent her to live in a village
with her grandparents to hide. They didn't file any paperwork
to register her birth, but as we've heard, the authorities
found her grandparents house and they came looking for her.
(05:15):
To evade them, n Young was then sent to an aunt,
far away from any family that she knew. She was
scrappy and strong willed, but she was essentially a five
year old fugitive in hiding and undocumented in her own country.
People used to call me latle black child. Yes, we
also have black children. It means we illegal children, and
(05:38):
they mobbed me for all. She's the little black girl
from Shandong Province. The term black children wasn't associated with
skin color. It was a comment about Shen Yan's position
in the social hierarchy. She wasn't only perceived as inferior
like there wasn't even a proper wrong for her. She
wasn't supposed to exist at all. We were like the
invisible generation, the ghost child. But like many other excess
(06:01):
birth children, Shen Young found a way to hack back
onto the grid and reinserting herself into the social order
would involve assuming a new identity. Shen young story will
provide a dramatic example of how status and leverage and
authority can affect a human life. But all of us
are sensitive even to the minor differences in power dynamics
(06:24):
that surround us within the first ten, fifteen, twenty seconds,
Like people already know what is the status situation in
this room. That's Dr Joey Cheng, sociologist at RK University
in Toronto, Canada. When we first enter a room, were
likely to rely on demographic shorthand guessing who's in control
(06:45):
based on age and race and gender. Then you start
paying attention right as people speak, to their body language,
to their non verbal cues. So you know, is this
person sitting up right? Are they expanded? Do they look
like they're taking up a lot of space? Being extroverted
is big, especially in North American culture. So there's even
(07:05):
this thing called the Babbler effect where the person who
speaks the most is the one who's likely to be
a leader in a room. Joey worked on a study
that also found we tend to spend more time looking
at the high status individuals in a group, but we
may have read our gaze if they look directly back
at us in a subtle sign of submission. We take
(07:28):
note of how others speak as well. Are they lowering
the pitch of their voice as they speak? Then studies
we find that when you measure the pitch of people's
voice when they first speak compared to how it changes
over time, the people who lower their voice they actually
get seen as more dominant and they end up having
(07:51):
more influence over a group. So when you think about,
you know, when we're in trouble, right, how do people
call our names? This stuff am to more than just
academic trivia. Judicial researchers have investigated why some jurors seem
to hold outsized influence on jury deliberations. Former British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher hired a speech coach to help her
(08:13):
lower her pitch to create a more authoritative presence, and
Joey herself notes that when hierarchical cues are built into
the language, they might even affect our intimate relationships. So
I think of the informal too in Spanish versus the formal.
THID languages like Thai and Japanese have many complicated levels
of deference and respect. Apparently even for Japanese speakers, like
(08:39):
kids growing up in Japan, that is a tricky thing
they have to learn to as they grow up. Is
like okay for this person, is this a context where
I use that hierarchical language or is this not? And
also it gets complicated after people get married. They kind
of the figure out like all right, do I start
using cago, which that hiwardic language with my in laws
(09:01):
or do I drop it? Like it's tricky. You contributed
a chapter to this book called Towards a Unified Science
of Hierarchy, and essentially you wrote that having an organizational
structure in a hierarchical form was a tool to resolve conflict.
Whereas I think right now in the modern world, we
(09:22):
imagine like hierarchies as the source of a lot of conflict.
Can you explain when you show submission that is a
way to prevent conflict in the absence of that hierarchy
while figuring out somebody's going to get hurt. So think
about like in a workplace meetings. Right when your assistant,
(09:45):
for instance, knows they're your assistant, you're not going to
be butting heads with them. It's like if you had
to remind them that they're your assistant because they've somehow forgotten,
then that's where you might have issues. Why and how
does some people land higher than others in the social hierarchy.
Scholars like Joey identify two classic strategies to achieve or
(10:10):
maintain a high status position. The first is dominance. Dominance
refers to the use of threat and intimidation to gain
influence over others, typically by instilling fear. Does it have
to be physical? It doesn't. So when your boss says
to you, you're not getting that raise next time, if
(10:30):
you're not going to work extra hours this weekend, or
you might even think of parents who you know when
you're threatening your kid that you're going to ground them.
So the implied threat often in humans that tends to
be verbal, right, but that is nevertheless still a form
of dominance. The second strategy to achieve status is prestige.
That's where you earn respect and influence based on your
(10:52):
skills and talents. So when my mom was sternly reminding
me I'm your mother, not your friend, she was flexing eminence.
Whereas when I proposed that we discussed the bedtime protocols.
I was hoping to be judged on my merit and
awarded some prestige. All human communities form hierarchies, and on
(11:13):
this we turned to Dr Zach Garfield, behavioral scientist and
evolutionary anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Study and to
Lose France. He says that even in hunter gatherers societies
that might not have fixed rules like chieftain people don't
live together as complete equals, there are still leaders still
varying levels of status. The hierarchy is just more dynamic.
(11:36):
Social influence might be more often based on just individual
capacities and the context. So what are we doing now?
Are we trying to clear feel? Are we trying to hunt?
Do we have a problem that needs to be resolved?
Who can best coordinate this collective action dilemma? And whoever
it kind of is there and can get the job
done might be chosen as a leader. Every culture operates
by its own rules, but there are some patterns to
(11:57):
how societies organize themselves. Cultures that developed in environments where
food and resources are plentiful tend to form more rigid
and stratified hierarchies. This trend can be seen, for example,
in some of the Native American societies of the Pacific Northwest.
The classic example is the northwest coast of North America,
where you have salmon runs. Many populations in the Northwest
(12:21):
coast did practice institutionalized slavery both before and after European colonization.
Some native tribes enslaved people and forced them into lives
of labor. Some form of lightered social order is observable
in every human society, and in non human ones too.
(12:41):
The term pecking order, for example, This coined just over
a hundred years ago by a Norwegian researcher studying chickens.
He noted, there are no two individual birds of any
given species which, when living together, did not know which
of the two has precedents and which is subordinate. I
have a shape in my head for high archy, like
I'm imagining like a pyramid. Is that what you imagine
(13:04):
or do you have like a totally different shape. I
think the pyramid is not a bad way to conceptualize.
It's just that there's going to be many pyramids, all
inside of each other at the same time, along different axis. Right,
It's like a rubics cut pyramid in your head. Yeah,
it's like a erubics creup pyramid. Yeah, and I've just
got a child's drawing of a triangle on a white
sheet of paper. Hierarchies can overlap their complex and though
(13:27):
they can sometimes be oppressive, they also help us get
a ton of stuff done. One clear advantage of hierarchies
is they help us coordinate as a group to achieve
some what we often call collective action. And humans, like
many other social species, Like all social species, we need
to live in a group. We can't survive on our own.
We can't consume enough calories on our own, we can't
raise our children on our own. We generally can't be
(13:49):
happy on our own. So we were bound to this
group living physiologically and psychologically. Lots of evidence suggests that
social hierarchies allow us to coordinate groups have been the
angels with non completely overlapping interests in a more effective way.
(14:16):
Hierarchies are clutched when a bunch of us try to
pull off something big. Listening to Zach reminded me of
a filmmaker friend, Lucian, who directed a music video for
one of my singles, and it was like this last minute,
little budget thing elusion wrote in a couple of film
friends to crew and their girlfriends generously agreed to help,
and we plan to like right around shopping carts at
a parking lot while lipstick totally goofy. But as soon
(14:39):
as the cameras started speeding, Lucian stops using people's names,
Like when he needs something, he just tails them by
their role on set p A or I see or gather,
and to them, this is clearly totally normal. When I
asked him about it later, he laughed and said he
forgot how weird that might look from the outside, but
that the rigid structure was actually part of what attracted
(15:00):
at him to film in the first place. It provides
order to this big community of freelance artists and technicians
that need to perform their jobs essentially interchangeably, and film
is a relatively new medium, he reminded me, so that
strict hierarchy just sort of emerged to make it all possible.
But yes, it was funny when he thought about it,
that he was shouting PA to get the attention of
(15:21):
the woman that he'd be going home with later. On
a proper movie set, people might be hoping to be
recognized for their skills and then promoted on the next
shoot the assistant director with an eye on the director's chair.
All individuals compete for status, pursue some social influence or
some social rank. We all can't strive to be the
next Lebron James. We know we all can't strive to
(15:42):
be the next nuclear physicist. But everyone can find some
domain in which they can compete for status. And I
think that is a universal feature of who we are.
Why just built in, like, what is this appetite for status?
So by finding some domain in which we can develop
some expertise, it makes you a valuable social partner. I'm
just gonna allow you to develop that social capital. And
(16:02):
if you can do that, then you'll be more likely
to survive, have greater well being survived, and reproduce. So
I think that's part of it. The motive to form
hierarchies maybe universal, but as we've heard, the resultant structures
look really different around the world. One of the most
formalized institutional versions of social stratification is the cast system
(16:25):
of South Asia. I'm aside that many economists and Ashoka University.
When you meet someone on the street, can you tell
immediately what cast that prison is from. No, you cannot.
For example, in urban India, you get into the metro
commuter train and you would not be able to tell
(16:45):
looking at people which costs they belong to. Absolutely not.
A Shweeny lives in Delhi and she wrote a book
called The Grammar of Cast. There isn't a straightforward counterpart
for cast in the West. It's not quite like race
or class, though there are overlaps. Cast is something you're
born into, something that can't be changed, even if your
(17:07):
circumstances do like blood type. And there are thousands of
jetty or individual cast designations, and historically each was linked
to a particular vocation priest or warrior, builder, farmer. The
system is ancient, but it's very much survived in modern India,
even if it functions less visibly than it used to.
A lot of contemporary modern occupations have no cost counterpart.
(17:32):
There is no cost of dentists or rocket scientists or
nuclear scientists, graphic designers, so if you want to encountered
a graphic designer, you wouldn't know what costs they belonged to.
But it still matters. Families aim to marry within their
own cast, and when people apply for jobs, private employers
try to suss out the cast of the applicants. The
system is culturally pervasive in South Asia. Some Muslim and
(17:54):
Christian communities and that part of the world have cast structures.
But the philosophical roots of the system connect to the
religious concept of reincarnation. And so what you are today
it must be because you're either being rewarded for being
good in the past life of you are being punished
for being bad in the past life. It's got my
basically in that world view, it would then follow that
(18:14):
the people born into the most empoverished and disrespected casts
somehow deserve it. The most severe consequences of the system
are born by those that were historically regarded as untouchable.
Untouchability is a set of practices that deems any interaction
with a certain group of people polluting. If they had
(18:38):
to cross the street in the village, they would have
to take their shoes off if they were wearing any
shoes at all, so that their footwear doesn't pollute the grounds, etcetera, etcetera.
So it was the most degrading experience of living. What
is the source of that? It's the occupations that these
groups were doing so basically everything that deals with dead
(18:58):
animals or per sins or excreta of any bodily fluid
things that are literally dirty. All of those occupations were
considered untouchable because these occupations were considered impure. But India's
Constitution of nineteen change that untouchability has been deemed illegal
(19:19):
in independent India. Well on paper itegal, but many, many
people still practice untouchability. Discrimination is rampant, unapologetic, and totally
over it. A teacher might send an untouchable boy to
sit behind in the class and say, what are you
doing here? You know you're going to grow up and
become a sweeper. Why do you need to get educated?
(19:40):
There is documentary evidence where students who belong to untouchable groups,
boys and girls, are made to clean toilets, a job
that janitors in school should be doing, not children. Members
of casts that were considered untouchable often call themselves dallets,
which means oppressed, and it's a term of pride. But
evidence of the continued depression is everywhere. Often on roadside
(20:04):
stalls that sell t you will see that there are
two kinds of tumblers kept there. There are some inferior tumblers,
and everybody knows that these tumblers are for the formerly
untouchable groups, and someone breaking the unstated codes risks violence.
He could just get beaten up. It happens literally every day.
(20:25):
So cast based violence is all pervasive for forgetting your
place in society, and sexual violence against the women by
upper cast men is also a way of showing the
lists where they belong. You better not forget your position,
otherwise will humiliate your women. Today, dalets are organizing campaigning
(20:49):
for fair treatment, building a dalt middle class, which of
course comes with its own resentments and complications. Do you
think the caste system reveals something about out human nature,
not just about India or South Asia. Yeah, many of
us benefit from inequality, and whether we are consciously aware
(21:10):
of that or not, we wouldn't be desperate to change
the system that would take away many of our benefits.
It may not happen in my lifetime, but hopefully, you know,
we will see strives to us day equality. Back to Chenyang,
(21:30):
the second or four daughters who grew up hidden from
the authorities, big changes would in fact happen in her lifetime,
but will rejoin her story where we left it when
shen Yang was a little girl, so in my family
household registration, I don't exist. To attend school, however, children
needed a household registration document, so the aunt and uncle
(21:51):
that chen Yang was living with I bought the document
from a distant relative named wun Ying, as she herself
was buying someone else's a document that would register her
in a big city, which would give her more opportunities
in her own education. To use wun Yang's papers, shen
Yang had to pretend the details written on it were
her own, including her age and birthday. They changed my
(22:14):
birthday to night four, so by law and miss Huang's
niece and I don't have parents, shen Yan's teachers called
her by the other girl's name in school. When she
got a driver's license, it was printed with the other
girl's name, and when she was married, the other girl's
birthday was read out loud at the wedding. And Shenyong
started to write a book about what her life has
(22:36):
been like as an excess child. And none of us
tell our own life stories with academic terms like elevated
social rank. But shen Yang's position in the social hierarchy
does look different now. There were people who used to
look down upon me. You want to publish a book?
Who do you think you are? Status is so often
(22:57):
informed by old forces and actors ideas about class, race, gender.
But this strange rule that's so defined Shen Young's position
in society was enacted only a few years before she
was born, and then it evaporated in the government started
to relax the one child policy, and then last year
(23:20):
two thousand twenty one, on May the thirty one, the
government released the New Potter City allow every couple to
have three children. How is your status different now the
one child policy is over. You live in a big city.
You have published a super rad book that has been
translated into at least one other language. People think, oh,
she's a writer now, because before I was nobody. I
(23:42):
don't want to be famous. I just want to tell
a story that is worth teddy. But of course, no
shift in policy can retroactively revise a childhood and a
comment she read online particularly resonated with Chenille. Once the
New Potter says out the sky I off Guangjo has
stuned our som immediately, and it's really havin It's the
(24:05):
tears of the eighties and Manetes generation. Human hierarchies help
us collaborate on goals we'd never be able to achieve
on our own. They can also minimize conflict by establishing
clear roles and expectations, and of course, sometimes they can
(24:27):
simply help people in powers stay that way at the
expense of those without the means to topple the pyramid.
Our hierarchical rules are sometimes codified boss versus assistant, mother
versus friend, and sometimes they're fluid. The homie whom majored
in film studies gets to pick the movie. The foodie
picks the place to order in. I am technically writing
(24:48):
this in my own corner office, but only that I
am sitting in a corner of my apartment, and wherever
I am working is functionally rendered an office. Now, when
I think back on that kid bragging about a dad,
it's a little bit more sympathy. We're all, in some sense,
little Charlotte Magne's and Charlie Mindy's trying to earn some respect,
so we've got something to offer. The trick is to
(25:10):
eke out some space for yourself without pushing someone else overboard.
Years ago, after the death of a family friend, rocked
my world pretty hard. I went to India and stood
for a long time at the burning gods, watching the
recently dead be incinerated in the open air by carefully
tended fires. And I loved India. The beauty and the
(25:31):
drama move me. Staring into the fires, I was brought
back to myself by a man. I hadn't heard. Approach
you know cast, he asked. I told him that I did,
and he explained he was a dom, a member of
the untouchable cast that for generations and generations lit the
funeral pyres. The low cast bodies were burned right on
(25:52):
the sand, he explained, but where the high cast ones
were burned, they could afford sandalwood. And he gestured for
me to inhale deep to note how good the high
cast fires smell. When we parted, we were both covered
in a fine layer of ash, partly the remains of
the deceased and status as sandal would perfume still rising
(26:13):
from the fires. Deeply Human is a BBC World Service
and American Public media co production with I Heart Media.
It's hosted by me Jessa. Find me online at Tessa
on Instagram and Dussa Darling on Twitter Next time, I'm
(26:37):
deeply human. We're talking about all your stuff, about the
human impulse to acquire, collect even horde. Is that impulse
driven by modern marketing or by older, deeper forces. Meet
me at the junk drawer for our next little chat
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