Prestige: concept, measurement, and the transmission of culture
Date
2019
Authors
Berl, Richard E. W., III, author
Gavin, Michael C., advisor
Jordan, Fiona M., committee member
Vaske, Jerry J., committee member
Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
Cultural transmission influences how we learn, what we learn, and from whom we learn. Factors such as prestige can influence this process, leading to broader evolutionary dynamics that shape cultural diversity. In this dissertation, I describe three studies designed to elucidate the role that prestige and other transmission biases play in determining the course of cultural transmission and cultural evolution. In the first study, we conduct a systematic review of the academic literature on prestige to determine how the concept of prestige has been defined within different academic traditions, and what potential determinants and consequences of prestige have been proposed. We find that the academic literature on prestige is highly fragmented and inconsistent, and we integrate the diversity of prestige concepts from the literature into a unified framework that represents prestige as an outcome of contributions from all levels of social structure and from individual performance in a social role. We then systematically sample and code the ethnographic literature using the unified framework to determine the variability of prestige concepts across non-Western cultures, and find that different societies show significant differences in how prestige is perceived and operationalized. Using the results of both reviews, we offer an integrative definition of prestige and comment on the utility and implications of the unified prestige framework and definition across disciplines. In the second study, we develop and validate a common scale to measure individual prestige in Western societies. Drawing from participants in the United States and United Kingdom, we elicit terms related to prestige and evaluate additional terms from the literature. We pare down this pool of terms using attitudinal ratings of speech from a separate group of participants to find which are most closely related to a generalized Western prestige concept and to determine their structure with an exploratory factor analysis framework. Using confirmatory factor analysis and cluster analyses, we obtain a 7-item scale with 3 factors contributing to prestige that we term position, reputation, and information (or "PRI"). Finally, we perform checks to ensure that the scale exhibits good fit, scale validity, and scale reliability. We provide guidance for using the scale and for extending it to other cultural contexts. In the third study, we conduct a transmission experiment to compare the effects of prestige bias (a model-based context bias in cultural transmission) against the effects of different content biases represented in a narrative. We use locally calibrated regional accents of English as proxies for prestige, their relative levels of prestige having been established using the PRI scale of individual prestige and an application of the scale to a variety of accents in the United States and United Kingdom. For the content of the narratives, we craft artificial creation stories to resemble real creation stories in their form and in the proportions of each content type suggested in the literature to influence transmission, which were social, survival, emotional, moral, rational, and counterintuitive information. We asked participants to listen to the stories read by a high- or low-prestige speaker, complete a visual memory-based distraction task, and recall the stories to us. Following coding and analysis of the data, we find that prestige does have a significant effect on participants' recall. However, the effect of prestige is small compared to those of social, survival, negative emotional, and biological counterintuitive information. Our results suggest that content biases may play a much more important role in cultural transmission than previously thought, and that the effects of prestige bias are largely limited to information that is free of content biases. As this study is the first to test all of these biases simultaneously, we discuss its implications for our understanding of the complexity of cultural transmission and cultural evolution. In these three studies, I provide a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of prestige in which we explore and integrate its diversity of concepts, develop a scale by which prestige can be reliably measured, and report the results of an experimental test of the effects of prestige on cultural transmission relative to content biases. As a whole, this research constitutes a substantial contribution to our collective knowledge of the nature and function of prestige and its variability. This improved understanding of prestige, and in particular the effects of prestige on the process of cultural transmission, has implications for cultural evolution, human dimensions and conservation social science research, and other disciplines across the social sciences.