Pulling Rank

around you, don't even register you're an adult. They're sweet, they're weird, they're funny, they're mean, and even though they're pint sized, they're already real sensitive to social status and hierarchy. I remember this one kid, let's call him Charlemagne, pulling ranked on another boy by explaining that his dad worked in a corner office. And I kept painting. But it occurred to me that this kid would have no idea

why a corner office was even desirable. He hadn't spent any time in his sunless cubicle, yet he just heard the boast at home and trotted it out. Here is evidence that Charlemagne Sr. Was higher up on the corporate ladder than this other kid, who was also waiting in line for me to paint a glitter batman on his cheek. I'm Dessa. This is deeply human, and we're talking about social status, prestige, influence and dominance, and our personal lives and our work lives and our societies at large. Why

do we form social hierarchies. We're born into the many hierarchy of our homes. We're parents of the de facto bosses. And as a little kid myself, I was very eager to level the family organizational chart, constantly campaigning my mom for an equal vote in domestic policy decisions. Let's all just are your case and trust the best plans will rise to the top. And I cannot tell you how much I hated her reply, I'm your mother, not your friend.

I hate that now. I hate saying that now. But when I was five and a half years old, Maxie was born, promoting me to middle management halfway around the world. A few years later, a little girl named Shenyang was born into a very different family, and when she was about five, she spent a night wrapped in her grandfather's

coat hiding from a government raid. They came at night, and I was really scared because my Grandpa took me to the top of the roof and we were hiding there, and that was one of the horrible scenes in my childhood. They flipped to my grandparents bed. They flipped it because they thought I were hiding underneath the bed. Of course they don't know my dame. They're just saying, where's the kid? Where's the kid? When you hear a kid, of course you are scared. Okay, let's get the context that led

to that scene on the roof. Can I ask you where year you were born? January the one I was born in Shandong, Jining, a small city, And if somebody was picturing China on a map, it's in B two in Beijing and Shanghai. And did you have siblings when you grew up? Uh? That's usually an innocent, getting to know you kind of question, But for Shen Young, it's complicated because legally she was not allowed to have siblings. By the mid eighties, China had a strict one child policy.

Each couple was permitted only one kid and would face serious fines for any additional births. But Chanyang was the second of four girls. My grandma used to say, Guanti and Guandi guan. You control the heaven, you control the earth. You cannot control people's belly. But the government did try to control pregnancies. It launched huge propaganda campaigns to dissuade couples from having what we're called excess birth children. And the slogans were really really intense. One x as birth

and the whole village gets their tubs tied. They're not just threatening, they're really taking people to get their tubes tied. Literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, some villages really did that. Girls were more likely to be aborted, abandoned, or given away during those years. Boys who could carry on the family line recorded higher status. Boys have to have all the privileges. They are like the spoilt light of the family. At dinner table, boys always get to eat chicken legs, so you know, the

meat the boy gets to eat first. There are many families in the countryside that the sisters sacrifice themselves not to go to school, but they go to work so they can pay the tuition for the brother. To enforce the one child rule, government officials raided homes if they found an excess birth child. They could demolish the house, take the family's furniture, food, or even the baby itself. Chan Yang's parents, who kept trying for a boy after she was born, sent her to live in a village

with her grandparents to hide. They didn't file any paperwork to register her birth, but as we've heard, the authorities found her grandparents house and they came looking for her. To evade them, n Young was then sent to an aunt, far away from any family that she knew. She was scrappy and strong willed, but she was essentially a five year old fugitive in hiding and undocumented in her own country. People used to call me latle black child. Yes, we

also have black children. It means we illegal children, and they mobbed me for all. She's the little black girl from Shandong Province. The term black children wasn't associated with skin color. It was a comment about Shen Yan's position in the social hierarchy. She wasn't only perceived as inferior like there wasn't even a proper wrong for her. She wasn't supposed to exist at all. We were like the

invisible generation, the ghost child. But like many other excess birth children, Shen Young found a way to hack back onto the grid and reinserting herself into the social order would involve assuming a new identity. Shen young story will provide a dramatic example of how status and leverage and

authority can affect a human life. But all of us are sensitive even to the minor differences in power dynamics that surround us within the first ten, fifteen, twenty seconds, Like people already know what is the status situation in this room. That's Dr Joey Cheng, sociologist at RK University in Toronto, Canada. When we first enter a room, were likely to rely on demographic shorthand guessing who's in control

based on age and race and gender. Then you start paying attention right as people speak, to their body language, to their non verbal cues. So you know, is this person sitting up right? Are they expanded? Do they look like they're taking up a lot of space? Being extroverted is big, especially in North American culture. So there's even this thing called the Babbler effect where the person who speaks the most is the one who's likely to be

a leader in a room. Joey worked on a study that also found we tend to spend more time looking at the high status individuals in a group, but we may have read our gaze if they look directly back at us in a subtle sign of submission. We take note of how others speak as well. Are they lowering

the pitch of their voice as they speak? Then studies we find that when you measure the pitch of people's voice when they first speak compared to how it changes over time, the people who lower their voice they actually get seen as more dominant and they end up having more influence over a group. So when you think about, you know, when we're in trouble, right, how do people call our names? This stuff am to more than just academic trivia. Judicial researchers have investigated why some jurors seem

to hold outsized influence on jury deliberations. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher hired a speech coach to help her lower her pitch to create a more authoritative presence, and Joey herself notes that when hierarchical cues are built into the language, they might even affect our intimate relationships. So I think of the informal too in Spanish versus the formal. THID languages like Thai and Japanese have many complicated levels

of deference and respect. Apparently even for Japanese speakers, like kids growing up in Japan, that is a tricky thing they have to learn to as they grow up. Is like okay for this person, is this a context where I use that hierarchical language or is this not? And also it gets complicated after people get married. They kind of the figure out like all right, do I start using cago, which that hiwardic language with my in laws

or do I drop it? Like it's tricky. You contributed a chapter to this book called Towards a Unified Science of Hierarchy, and essentially you wrote that having an organizational structure in a hierarchical form was a tool to resolve conflict. Whereas I think right now in the modern world, we imagine like hierarchies as the source of a lot of conflict. Can you explain when you show submission that is a way to prevent conflict in the absence of that hierarchy

while figuring out somebody's going to get hurt. So think about like in a workplace meetings. Right when your assistant, for instance, knows they're your assistant, you're not going to be butting heads with them. It's like if you had to remind them that they're your assistant because they've somehow forgotten, then that's where you might have issues. Why and how does some people land higher than others in the social hierarchy. Scholars like Joey identify two classic strategies to achieve or

maintain a high status position. The first is dominance. Dominance refers to the use of threat and intimidation to gain influence over others, typically by instilling fear. Does it have to be physical? It doesn't. So when your boss says to you, you're not getting that raise next time, if you're not going to work extra hours this weekend, or you might even think of parents who you know when you're threatening your kid that you're going to ground them.

So the implied threat often in humans that tends to be verbal, right, but that is nevertheless still a form of dominance. The second strategy to achieve status is prestige. That's where you earn respect and influence based on your skills and talents. So when my mom was sternly reminding me I'm your mother, not your friend, she was flexing eminence. Whereas when I proposed that we discussed the bedtime protocols. I was hoping to be judged on my merit and

awarded some prestige. All human communities form hierarchies, and on this we turned to Dr Zach Garfield, behavioral scientist and evolutionary anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Study and to Lose France. He says that even in hunter gatherers societies that might not have fixed rules like chieftain people don't live together as complete equals, there are still leaders still varying levels of status. The hierarchy is just more dynamic.

Social influence might be more often based on just individual capacities and the context. So what are we doing now? Are we trying to clear feel? Are we trying to hunt? Do we have a problem that needs to be resolved? Who can best coordinate this collective action dilemma? And whoever it kind of is there and can get the job done might be chosen as a leader. Every culture operates by its own rules, but there are some patterns to

how societies organize themselves. Cultures that developed in environments where food and resources are plentiful tend to form more rigid and stratified hierarchies. This trend can be seen, for example, in some of the Native American societies of the Pacific Northwest. The classic example is the northwest coast of North America, where you have salmon runs. Many populations in the Northwest coast did practice institutionalized slavery both before and after European colonization.

Some native tribes enslaved people and forced them into lives of labor. Some form of lightered social order is observable in every human society, and in non human ones too. The term pecking order, for example, This coined just over a hundred years ago by a Norwegian researcher studying chickens. He noted, there are no two individual birds of any given species which, when living together, did not know which

of the two has precedents and which is subordinate. I have a shape in my head for high archy, like I'm imagining like a pyramid. Is that what you imagine or do you have like a totally different shape. I think the pyramid is not a bad way to conceptualize. It's just that there's going to be many pyramids, all inside of each other at the same time, along different axis. Right, It's like a rubics cut pyramid in your head. Yeah,

it's like a erubics creup pyramid. Yeah, and I've just got a child's drawing of a triangle on a white sheet of paper. Hierarchies can overlap their complex and though they can sometimes be oppressive, they also help us get a ton of stuff done. One clear advantage of hierarchies is they help us coordinate as a group to achieve some what we often call collective action. And humans, like many other social species, Like all social species, we need to live in a group. We can't survive on our own.

We can't consume enough calories on our own, we can't raise our children on our own. We generally can't be happy on our own. So we were bound to this group living physiologically and psychologically. Lots of evidence suggests that social hierarchies allow us to coordinate groups have been the angels with non completely overlapping interests in a more effective way. Hierarchies are clutched when a bunch of us try to

pull off something big. Listening to Zach reminded me of a filmmaker friend, Lucian, who directed a music video for one of my singles, and it was like this last minute, little budget thing elusion wrote in a couple of film friends to crew and their girlfriends generously agreed to help, and we plan to like right around shopping carts at

a parking lot while lipstick totally goofy. But as soon as the cameras started speeding, Lucian stops using people's names, Like when he needs something, he just tails them by their role on set p A or I see or gather, and to them, this is clearly totally normal. When I asked him about it later, he laughed and said he forgot how weird that might look from the outside, but that the rigid structure was actually part of what attracted

at him to film in the first place. It provides order to this big community of freelance artists and technicians that need to perform their jobs essentially interchangeably, and film is a relatively new medium, he reminded me, so that strict hierarchy just sort of emerged to make it all possible. But yes, it was funny when he thought about it, that he was shouting PA to get the attention of

the woman that he'd be going home with later. On a proper movie set, people might be hoping to be recognized for their skills and then promoted on the next shoot the assistant director with an eye on the director's chair. All individuals compete for status, pursue some social influence or some social rank. We all can't strive to be the next Lebron James. We know we all can't strive to be the next nuclear physicist. But everyone can find some

domain in which they can compete for status. And I think that is a universal feature of who we are. Why just built in, like, what is this appetite for status? So by finding some domain in which we can develop some expertise, it makes you a valuable social partner. I'm just gonna allow you to develop that social capital. And if you can do that, then you'll be more likely to survive, have greater well being survived, and reproduce. So

I think that's part of it. The motive to form hierarchies maybe universal, but as we've heard, the resultant structures look really different around the world. One of the most formalized institutional versions of social stratification is the cast system of South Asia. I'm aside that many economists and Ashoka University. When you meet someone on the street, can you tell immediately what cast that prison is from. No, you cannot.

For example, in urban India, you get into the metro commuter train and you would not be able to tell looking at people which costs they belong to. Absolutely not. A Shweeny lives in Delhi and she wrote a book called The Grammar of Cast. There isn't a straightforward counterpart for cast in the West. It's not quite like race or class, though there are overlaps. Cast is something you're born into, something that can't be changed, even if your

circumstances do like blood type. And there are thousands of jetty or individual cast designations, and historically each was linked to a particular vocation priest or warrior, builder, farmer. The system is ancient, but it's very much survived in modern India, even if it functions less visibly than it used to. A lot of contemporary modern occupations have no cost counterpart.

There is no cost of dentists or rocket scientists or nuclear scientists, graphic designers, so if you want to encountered a graphic designer, you wouldn't know what costs they belonged to. But it still matters. Families aim to marry within their own cast, and when people apply for jobs, private employers try to suss out the cast of the applicants. The system is culturally pervasive in South Asia. Some Muslim and Christian communities and that part of the world have cast structures.

But the philosophical roots of the system connect to the religious concept of reincarnation. And so what you are today it must be because you're either being rewarded for being good in the past life of you are being punished for being bad in the past life. It's got my basically in that world view, it would then follow that the people born into the most empoverished and disrespected casts

somehow deserve it. The most severe consequences of the system are born by those that were historically regarded as untouchable. Untouchability is a set of practices that deems any interaction with a certain group of people polluting. If they had to cross the street in the village, they would have to take their shoes off if they were wearing any shoes at all, so that their footwear doesn't pollute the grounds, etcetera, etcetera. So it was the most degrading experience of living. What

is the source of that? It's the occupations that these groups were doing so basically everything that deals with dead animals or per sins or excreta of any bodily fluid things that are literally dirty. All of those occupations were considered untouchable because these occupations were considered impure. But India's Constitution of nineteen change that untouchability has been deemed illegal in independent India. Well on paper itegal, but many, many

people still practice untouchability. Discrimination is rampant, unapologetic, and totally over it. A teacher might send an untouchable boy to sit behind in the class and say, what are you doing here? You know you're going to grow up and become a sweeper. Why do you need to get educated? There is documentary evidence where students who belong to untouchable groups, boys and girls, are made to clean toilets, a job

that janitors in school should be doing, not children. Members of casts that were considered untouchable often call themselves dallets, which means oppressed, and it's a term of pride. But evidence of the continued depression is everywhere. Often on roadside stalls that sell t you will see that there are

two kinds of tumblers kept there. There are some inferior tumblers, and everybody knows that these tumblers are for the formerly untouchable groups, and someone breaking the unstated codes risks violence. He could just get beaten up. It happens literally every day. So cast based violence is all pervasive for forgetting your place in society, and sexual violence against the women by upper cast men is also a way of showing the lists where they belong. You better not forget your position,

otherwise will humiliate your women. Today, dalets are organizing campaigning for fair treatment, building a dalt middle class, which of course comes with its own resentments and complications. Do you think the caste system reveals something about out human nature, not just about India or South Asia. Yeah, many of us benefit from inequality, and whether we are consciously aware of that or not, we wouldn't be desperate to change the system that would take away many of our benefits.

It may not happen in my lifetime, but hopefully, you know, we will see strives to us day equality. Back to Chenyang, the second or four daughters who grew up hidden from the authorities, big changes would in fact happen in her lifetime, but will rejoin her story where we left it when shen Yang was a little girl, so in my family

household registration, I don't exist. To attend school, however, children needed a household registration document, so the aunt and uncle that chen Yang was living with I bought the document from a distant relative named wun Ying, as she herself was buying someone else's a document that would register her in a big city, which would give her more opportunities in her own education. To use wun Yang's papers, shen Yang had to pretend the details written on it were

her own, including her age and birthday. They changed my birthday to night four, so by law and miss Huang's niece and I don't have parents, shen Yan's teachers called her by the other girl's name in school. When she got a driver's license, it was printed with the other girl's name, and when she was married, the other girl's birthday was read out loud at the wedding. And Shenyong started to write a book about what her life has

been like as an excess child. And none of us tell our own life stories with academic terms like elevated social rank. But shen Yang's position in the social hierarchy does look different now. There were people who used to look down upon me. You want to publish a book? Who do you think you are? Status is so often informed by old forces and actors ideas about class, race, gender.

But this strange rule that's so defined Shen Young's position in society was enacted only a few years before she was born, and then it evaporated in the government started to relax the one child policy, and then last year two thousand twenty one, on May the thirty one, the government released the New Potter City allow every couple to have three children. How is your status different now the one child policy is over. You live in a big city. You have published a super rad book that has been

translated into at least one other language. People think, oh, she's a writer now, because before I was nobody. I don't want to be famous. I just want to tell a story that is worth teddy. But of course, no shift in policy can retroactively revise a childhood and a comment she read online particularly resonated with Chenille. Once the New Potter says out the sky I off Guangjo has stuned our som immediately, and it's really havin It's the

tears of the eighties and Manetes generation. Human hierarchies help us collaborate on goals we'd never be able to achieve on our own. They can also minimize conflict by establishing clear roles and expectations, and of course, sometimes they can simply help people in powers stay that way at the expense of those without the means to topple the pyramid. Our hierarchical rules are sometimes codified boss versus assistant, mother versus friend, and sometimes they're fluid. The homie whom majored

in film studies gets to pick the movie. The foodie picks the place to order in. I am technically writing this in my own corner office, but only that I am sitting in a corner of my apartment, and wherever I am working is functionally rendered an office. Now, when I think back on that kid bragging about a dad, it's a little bit more sympathy. We're all, in some sense, little Charlotte Magne's and Charlie Mindy's trying to earn some respect,

so we've got something to offer. The trick is to eke out some space for yourself without pushing someone else overboard. Years ago, after the death of a family friend, rocked my world pretty hard. I went to India and stood for a long time at the burning gods, watching the recently dead be incinerated in the open air by carefully tended fires. And I loved India. The beauty and the drama move me. Staring into the fires, I was brought back to myself by a man. I hadn't heard. Approach

you know cast, he asked. I told him that I did, and he explained he was a dom, a member of the untouchable cast that for generations and generations lit the funeral pyres. The low cast bodies were burned right on the sand, he explained, but where the high cast ones were burned, they could afford sandalwood. And he gestured for me to inhale deep to note how good the high

cast fires smell. When we parted, we were both covered in a fine layer of ash, partly the remains of the deceased and status as sandal would perfume still rising from the fires. Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American Public media co production with I Heart Media. It's hosted by me Jessa. Find me online at Tessa on Instagram and Dussa Darling on Twitter Next time, I'm deeply human. We're talking about all your stuff, about the

human impulse to acquire, collect even horde. Is that impulse driven by modern marketing or by older, deeper forces. Meet me at the junk drawer for our next little chat