People preferentially learn beliefs and behaviour from individuals whom others treat as prestigious, rather than from those they can independently judge as correct.
Henrich and Gil-White argued in 2001 that prestige is a distinct route to influence from dominance: deference is freely given in exchange for proximity and the chance to copy. Because the learner usually cannot evaluate the skill directly, they use other people's deference as the cue, which means prestige transfers across domains it was never earned in.
In practice
- A footballer's opinion on a vaccine reaches more people than a virologist's, and the mechanism is the same one that makes apprenticeship work.
- A team adopts a working method because the most admired engineer uses it, and nobody has compared it with the alternative.