Egalitarianism as hierarchy control: Predictive social minds and the evolution of anti-dominance institutions.

Authors

Sarfaraz K Niazi

Published in

The Behavioral and brain sciences. Volume 49. Pages e439. Oct 02, 2026. Epub Oct 02, 2026.

Abstract

Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden redefine egalitarianism as a process rather than an outcome. We extend this framework by arguing that egalitarian societies represent cognitive-ecological equilibria in which evolved psychological systems regulate dominance hierarchies. The six identified processes correspond to distinct neurocognitive mechanisms for hierarchy suppression, interpretable as distributed strategies for managing hierarchical risk within predictive processing.

PMID:
42825731
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 02 Oct 2026.

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