Talent and experience shape competitive social hierarchies

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive model of social hierarchies that integrates individual talent and social reinforcement, revealing complex dynamics like trade-offs, paradoxical correlations, and rank reversals in both closed and open societies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mathematical model combining talent and social reinforcement, analyzing their combined effects on hierarchy stability and structure.

Findings

Trade-off between relationship stability and top talent placement.

Positive global but negative local correlation between talent and rank.

Removal of older, less talented individuals can cause rank reversals.

Abstract

Hierarchy of social organization is a ubiquitous property of animal and human groups, linked to resource allocation, collective decisions, individual health, and even to social instability. Experimental evidence shows that both intrinsic abilities of individuals and social reinforcement processes impact hierarchies; existing mathematical models, however, focus on the latter. Here, we develop a rigorous model that incorporates both features and explore their synergistic effect on stability and the structure of hierarchy. For pairwise interactions, we show that there is a trade-off between relationship stability and having the most talented individuals in the highest ranks. Extending this to open societies, where individuals enter and leave the population, we show that important societal effects arise from the interaction between talent and social processes: (i) despite positive global correlation between talent and rank, paradoxically, local correlation is negative, and (ii) the removal of an individual can induce a series of rank reversals. We show that the mechanism underlying the latter is the removal of an older individual of limited talent, who nonetheless was able to suppress the rise of younger, more talented individuals.