Arizona State University researchers say a deeply rooted human habit - looking to people we see as experts - may be wired into our psychology. Their new paper finds that "prestige," or the tendency to follow those who already have followers, can quietly create leaders and unequal influence without anyone lifting a finger in force. The team at ASU's Institute for Human Origins in Tempe frames that built-in social radar as both an evolutionary edge and a modern warning label.
What The Study Did
The study, published in Nature Communications, combines individual-based cultural-evolutionary models, online behavioral experiments and long-run evolutionary simulations. By blending those tools, the authors tested how even a small bias toward prestige can nudge group decisions toward a few highly influential individuals.
Experiments Show Copying Can Snowball
Thomas Morgan, an associate professor and the paper's corresponding author, told ASU News that prestige "identifies expertise and then allows the whole group to benefit." He said that tendency likely evolved when humans became more dependent on learning from one another.
To see that bias in action, the researchers ran an online experiment with 800 people recruited through MTurk. They put participants into 80 groups of 10 and gave them quick perceptual tasks where each person could copy a teammate's answer, according to Nature Communications. Influence quickly concentrated: a small number of people ended up shaping most of the group's choices, and in some cases the crowd copied models who were not actually the most accurate.
Why It Matters For Today
Local coverage at KJZZ quoted Morgan warning that "prestige has this snowballing tendency" - a dynamic that can produce leaders without a strong check on how competent they really are. KJZZ reported that the researchers see the same pattern echoing through workplaces, politics and social media feeds.
ASU's press materials and science outlets have described the findings as a mixed blessing. Prestige can speed up learning and help groups coordinate, but it also creates pressure to hold leaders accountable, according to the university release on EurekAlert!. The authors have posted their anonymized data and code on OSF so other researchers can explore when prestige helps groups and when it backfires.
For Phoenix readers, the study is a reminder that work happening on ASU's Tempe campus is reshaping how we think about human behavior across time and across platforms. The researchers say the takeaway is straightforward: expertise matters, but communities also need rules and scrutiny to be sure the people we follow are actually earning that trust.
