Social dominance hierarchy and the pride–shame system

ABSTRACT

The emotions of pride and shame occur as adaptive reactions to high and low status in social dominance hierarchies. We argue that pride and shame are secondary emotions that comprise anger and joy, and fear and sadness. After considering dominance, proto-pride, and proto-shame in animals, we present a theoretical model showing that, for humans, pride and shame are elicited by oppositely valenced experiences of authority-ranked and communally shared social relations. Using pride and shame as criterion variables, we test two models through analysis of a corpus of 563 life-historical interviews with Australian Aborigines and Euro-Australians. The results of covariance-structure analyses support these hypothesized causal models.

KEYWORDS:

• Pride
• shame
• emotions
• social dominance
• social relations models

Notes

1. Pride-filled individuals with a strong social dominance orientation can also experience a ruthless form of anomie, or psychopathologies such as narcissism and sociopathy, which can predispose them to shamelessly ignore, or even treat with contempt and derision, the normative order of society, and to act in their raw self-interest with indifference to the well-being of others (TenHouten 2016a).

2. While Plutchik’s existential problems are not given social content, a parallel model by MacLean (1990) identifies essentially the same adaptive elements, but emphasizes that they function as communicative displays. Parallel to Plutchik’s identity, temporality, hierarchy, and territoriality dimensions, MacLean identifies signature displays, courtship displays, dominance and submission displays, and territorial displays (see TenHouten 2013, pp. 23–35).

3. Regarding resentment, Plutchik ([1962] 1991, pp. 118, 156) first suggested that ‘anger + surprise = outrage, resentment, hate’, then suggested that ‘feelings of resentment are composed of (at least) disgust and anger’. Combining these statement, it follows that ‘resentment = anger & surprise & disgust’, which further suggests that resentment combines contempt (anger and disgust), shock (surprise and disgust), and outrage (anger and surprise) (TenHouten 2013, pp. 19–22).

4. Shaver et al. (1987) see ‘pride, triumph’ as one of many ‘scripts’ or ‘prototypes’ existing as secondary-level branches of the ‘basic’ emotion, ‘ joy’; they see ‘shame’ and ‘humiliation’ as members of different (but adjacent) branches of the basic emotion ‘sadness’. Weisfeld and Wendorf (2000, pp. 121–125) argue that pride and shame are ‘a single basic emotion’. We rather hold that pride and shame are separate, though systematically interrelated, emotions, and that they are not primary or basic but rather secondary, each being comprised of two primary emotions.

6. Nathanson (1987) cites Tomkins (1963) correct observation that shame inhibits the primary emotions ‘enjoyment–joy’ and ‘interest–excitement’, then infers that pride is a mixture of joy and interest–excitement. However, Tomkins’ interest–excitement can be interpreted as ‘anticipation’ (Plutchik 1962) or ‘seeking’ (Panksepp and Biven 2012, pp. 95–144), and the anticipation of a joyful outcome can better be seen as definitive of optimism (with the anticipation of a sad outcome defining pessimism) (TenHouten 2007, pp. 75–77, 2013, pp. 65–73, 133–136). One can anticipate winning and then experiencing pride, but pride itself is not intrinsically anticipatory, rather being experienced upon winning.

7. Tracy et al. (2005), however, found that children can recognize pride expressions above chance level by age 4 years, and were able to distinguish it from expressions of happiness and surprise. Anger was not included in Tracy et al.’s experimental designs.

8. Stable social hierarchies spontaneously emerge among groups of children as young as 2 years (Cummins 2000, Boyce 2004).

9. Broucek (1979, p. 376), in his review of studies linking smiling and pleasure to mastery and control, also saw the primitive shame of the infant as the result of ‘inefficacy experience’.

10. J. Turner (2010) sees shame as a tertiary emotion, whose components are fear, sadness, and anger. But while anger can be induced by the experience of shame, it does not appear to be interior to shame; analyses of shame link it to anger, as for example, in shame–rage cycles (Scheff 1998), but maintain a distinction between the two emotions.

11. The similarity of fear and sadness can be seen in Plutchik’s ‘wheel’ (Figure 1), where adjacency means maximum similarity. The primary emotions of anger and joy–happiness, at the positive ends of the hierarchy and temporality axes, are also adjacent and therefore similar. The similarity of fear and sadness was recognized by Spinoza ([1660] 2002, p. 261), who wrote: ‘Fear is an ill-assured sadness, arising from the idea of some past or future thing of which we are in some doubt as to the result’.

12. Panksepp (2007), questions whether disgust is an emotion, but Shand (1914, pp. 370–394) had effectively distinguished primitive, visceral disgust from the derivative, sociomoral emotion that has developed out of it. Ortony and T. Turner (1990, p. 317) suggest that both surprise and anticipation possess too much cognitive content to be regarded as emotions (but cf. TenHouten 2007, p. 47).

13. For all wordlists categories, the sums of the words spoken were weighted by 10⁴ and divided by the total words spoken.