There Are Two Completely Different Ways to Reach the Top

Think of two people who both clearly run the room. One gets listened to because people are a little afraid of what happens if they do not. The other gets listened to because people actually want their opinion, seek them out for advice, and imitate how they do things. Both have status. Both have influence over group decisions. And according to a body of research building on evolutionary anthropology, they got there by two genuinely different routes.

Two evolutionary strategies for the same goal

In 2001, the anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White proposed that humans evolved not one but two distinct routes to social rank. The first, dominance, is the one shared with many other social animals: rank through the capacity to inflict costs, backed by intimidation, aggression, or control over resources other people need. The second, prestige, is something closer to unique among humans in the size of the role it plays: rank through freely given deference, granted by other people because they judge someone to be genuinely skilled, knowledgeable, or worth learning from.

The evolutionary logic for prestige is about information. Humans rely enormously on copying skills and knowledge from other humans rather than reinventing them alone, and it pays to be selective about who you copy. Deferring to someone genuinely good at something - and getting a bit of access to their knowledge, their allies, or their example in exchange - is a good trade even without anyone forcing the issue. Dominance does not require anyone to agree it is deserved; prestige, by definition, does.

You can see both status strategies in almost any workplace, classroom or sports team. The manager everyone quietly routes around, who gets compliance mainly by controlling schedules, budgets or performance reviews, is running on dominance, whether or not they would describe it that way. The colleague nobody manages but everyone quotes, whose opinion on a technical problem gets sought out unprompted, is running on prestige. Both can end a meeting having gotten their way; the theory's contribution is showing that "getting your way" is not one single currency but at least two, earned and spent differently.

Putting the theory to the test

A 2013 study by Joey Cheng, Jessica Tracy, Tom Foulsham, Alan Kingstone and Joseph Henrich set out to see whether these were really two separate things rather than one trait described with two words. In the first of two studies, groups of previously unacquainted people worked together on a task and then rated each other's influence, with outside observers adding a second, independent judgment; a behavioral measure captured how much actual sway each person had over the group's decisions. In the second study, a fresh set of participants watched brief video clips of those same group interactions while their gaze was tracked, to see whose behavior drew the most attention.

The two routes came apart, but not quite the way you might expect. Adopting either a dominance or a prestige strategy predicted greater perceived influence and greater measured, behavioral influence over the group - so both routes genuinely worked, and roughly equally well. What differed sharply was how people felt about the person using each one: those running on prestige were generally well liked, while those running on dominance were not, even though the two strategies bought a similar amount of real influence, and the gap in likability was not simply a byproduct of who was more popular from the start. The eye-tracking study added a further piece: both dominant and prestigious people drew more visual attention than people low on either trait, which fits the idea that other people keep an eye on both kinds of status, whether the interest is caution or curiosity.

What each strategy costs

Dominance can produce fast results: fear is an efficient way to get short-term compliance, and it does not require the other person's respect, only their calculation that resisting costs more than complying. But it is also more fragile. It has to be maintained, tends to provoke resentment and resistance the moment the threat weakens, and generally does not survive the dominant person losing their leverage. Prestige is slower to build, since it requires actually demonstrating competence over time and having other people recognize it, but it tends to be more stable once established, because it does not depend on anyone's fear - only on continued respect.

Being honest about the limits

Most of this research comes from short laboratory tasks and self-report questionnaires with samples drawn heavily from university students in a handful of countries, which is a real limitation for a theory that claims to describe something universal about human social organization. The clean two-way split also does not mean every real leader falls neatly into one bucket - most people who hold real power blend the two in different proportions, and a single person can rely more on one strategy in one setting and the other elsewhere. The theory is a genuinely useful lens, not a complete map of how status actually works in any given office, family or friend group.

What this means for you

If you notice yourself, or someone you deal with regularly, leaning on intimidation, controlling access to resources, or the implicit threat of consequences to get compliance, that is a dominance strategy, and the research suggests it tends to be brittle over the long run - it works only as long as the fear holds. Leadership style built more on demonstrated competence, generosity with useful knowledge, and letting your track record do the persuading is the prestige route, and it is the one more likely to survive the day your formal power disappears. Political skill, in this framing, is less about picking one strategy forever and more about recognizing honestly which one you are actually running on in a given relationship or group - and whether that matches the kind of standing you actually want.