A functionalist approach to social status in social animals, humans and the dog-human community. The prestige-based social system hypothesis.

Social status plays a crucial role in shaping interactions. Despite its broad significance, research on status hierarchies remains largely fragmented across disciplines and results relating to dominance in the field of biology versus results relating to prestige in the field of human sciences are not integrated in a unified framework. In this paper, we examine how dominance and prestige contribute to hierarchical structures, considering both functionalist and critical perspectives on social status, by reviewing empirical findings from primates, human societies, and the dog-human bond. While dominance is a common strategy for establishing status across species, here we argue that prestige-based hierarchies-characterized by social learning and cooperation-are particularly influential in both human and dog-human interactions. We propose extending the dominance-prestige model by introducing the concept of "super-prestige" which describes the dependency-driven relationship between dogs and humans. This perspective challenges traditional dominance-based frameworks and offers a novel approach to understanding interspecies social structures.