Not us, Not here // mixed media

The terrorist attacks of September 11th were a devastating tragedy for the sheer loss of human life, and an unforgettable shock for challenging our sense of presumed global dominance. Individuals have a fundamental need for perceiving their social world as stable and predictable, and the recent terrorist attacks on American soil disrupted our notion of safety due to our position on top of the social hierarchy in the global sphere, hence ensued chaos in our minds.

Despite the progress and extension of human rights across the world, human societies, independent of their form of governance and economical structure, tend to organize as group-based social hierarchies; in which one group enjoys a disproportionate share of positive social values, and negative social values are disproportionally experienced by the subordinate group.

Research in the field of social psychology has revealed much about how human beings communicate social dominance or submissiveness through facial cues and body language, but the neural bases of social status hierarchy remains unclear. Interestingly, research on self-perception has revealed that unlike all other traits, individuals do not favorably exaggerate their place within the social hierarchy, demonstrating the evolutionary advantage quality of this trait.

Social dominance hierarchy is a fundamental organizing principle across a variety of species in the animal kingdom such as ants, bees, birds, and other primates. Due to ubiquitous presence of systems of social hierarchy across species and cultures, neuroscientists find it plausible that the human ability to successfully navigate hierarchical social interaction arises from adaptive neuronal mechanisms.

A recent study on this topic has demonstrated that neural representations of social status shares properties with those of numerical representations. Neuroimaging techniques have shown that social status and number comparisons recruit distinct and overlapping neuronal representations within human inferior parietal cortex.

Understanding and recognition of how our brain perceives social hierarchy, has the potential to allow us to move past the “Us vs Them” mentality that dominates our current social and global perspective, to a place where we view such behavioral inclinations as vestiges of our evolutionary past rather than the governing facts of our present society.