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

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.