Can status evolve to organize cooperation?

In a recent essay titled “Status Organizes Cooperation: An Evolutionary Theory of Status and Social Order,” Noah P. Mark (2018) has advanced an illuminating model of how status behaviors could have evolved to organize social cooperation in the context of social dilemmas such as the prisoner’s dilemma. In this essay we argue Mark’s central result hinges on a number of modeling assumptions that bias the model in favor of cooperation which, once relaxed, preempt cooperative status behaviors from evolving. Nevertheless, we believe that the basic insight behind Mark’s ideas can still be recovered in the case of a less daunting kind of social dilemma.