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A new study suggests that intelligence may raise a person’s standing in a group mainly through what it allows them to do for others. In research published in Evolution and Human Behavior, university students with higher cognitive test scores tended to devise better solutions to a group planning puzzle, and those who devised better solutions received more respect from a partner after a brief exchange. The authors see the results as initial support for the idea that human intelligence evolved partly as a way to earn status by providing useful mental services to one’s group.
In human groups, social status often takes the form of prestige, which is standing freely granted to individuals through respect, admiration, and voluntary deference rather than fear or physical intimidation. Evolutionary psychologists link prestige closely to what they call coalitional value, a term that describes how useful a person is to their social group or alliance in achieving shared goals. Because group living requires constant cooperation, humans tend to track who contributes the most to collective success and reward those high-value partners with influence and social standing.
Understanding how these group dynamics work may help answer a major question in biology: why the human brain nearly tripled in size over the past two to three million years. Much of this expansion occurred in the prefrontal cortex, the front region of the brain responsible for complex planning, decision-making, and flexible behavior. Although an analysis of ancient DNA from West Eurasia indicates that natural selection actively favored genetic variants linked to higher cognitive ability over the past 10,000 years, scientists still debate what specific survival or reproductive advantages drove that trend.
One set of evolutionary explanations suggests that bigger brains evolved to solve ecological challenges like crafting tools, hunting, or surviving harsh climates, yet many other animal species face identical environmental pressures without developing human-level intellect. Another view proposes that intelligence evolved through sexual selection as a courtship display to attract mates, much like a peacock’s tail. However, that idea struggles to explain why men and women show virtually identical general intelligence and why objective cognitive test scores often fail to predict romantic attractiveness in live dating studies.
A third perspective holds that human brainpower was shaped primarily by social competition and the need to navigate group living. Proponents of this view argue that once early humans mastered their physical environments, other humans became their main evolutionary rivals, forcing individuals to form cooperative alliances in order to compete against rival groups. Within these alliances, people who could think ahead and coordinate others became highly sought-after partners.
Psychological research offers some support for a link between mental ability and group hierarchy. A 2004 analysis that pooled results from earlier studies found that more intelligent people tend to emerge as leaders and be seen as effective, although the connection was more modest than earlier researchers had assumed. To explain why groups elevate capable leaders, the authors of a 2014 theoretical paper proposed a “service-for-prestige” model, arguing that followers voluntarily grant respect and deference to leaders as payback for solving coordination problems that benefit everyone.
Three of the new study’s authors built on these ideas in a 2026 theoretical paper that laid out the Coalitional Intelligence Hypothesis, which argues that human intelligence evolved because its outward behaviors signal a person’s capacity to provide demanding mental services to their group in exchange for status.
“The broader motivation is a long-standing puzzle: why did humans evolve such high levels of intelligence?” said study lead author Jonathan Egeland, a researcher at the University of Agder and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “We build on an idea from the evolutionary biologist Richard Alexander, who argued that ancestral humans ‘had to cooperate to compete.’ Our Coalitional Intelligence Hypothesis develops this idea by proposing that human intelligence evolved due to reciprocity: Intelligent individuals provide useful services or benefits to their group, such as helping members coordinate, and they are rewarded with status in return.”
“To test this, we had to address a gap between two research traditions,” Egeland told PsyPost. “Research in personality and differential psychology has shown that cognitive ability predicts status, but status there is usually measured as socioeconomic status (income, education, or occupation). Anthropologists, by contrast, focus on prestige: the respect, admiration, and voluntary deference people give to valued group members, which is the kind of status most relevant to human evolution. However, those studies usually rely on subjective rather than objective measures of intelligence.”
To bring these two traditions together and put the hypothesis to its first direct test, Egeland and his colleagues designed a laboratory study that paired a formal intelligence test with ratings of how much respect and admiration people earned from a partner. The study was preregistered, meaning the researchers publicly recorded their hypotheses and analysis plan before collecting data. They wanted to see whether higher test scores go along with more prestige after working on a group problem, whether any such link runs through how well a person actually solves that problem, and whether people can accurately judge a partner’s intelligence during a brief interaction.
The researchers recruited 175 university students in Norway with an average age of about 23 years and an average of 1.6 years of college education. The sample was 58.3 percent female and 38.3 percent male, with the remaining participants identifying as another gender or choosing not to report their sex. Participants formed 85 complete pairs, known in psychology as dyads, and were compensated with either a cafeteria gift card worth 100 Norwegian kroner or a one-in-five raffle chance to win movie tickets.
The experiment took place in three stages, starting with individual assessments. Participants first viewed a diagram of a standard bell curve showing how intelligence scores are distributed in the general population, with an average score of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, and estimated their own score on that scale, a measure collected for a broader project and not analyzed in this paper. Next, they completed a 16-item cognitive ability test that the bilingual research team had translated into Norwegian and verified using blind back-translation into English. This test measured four distinct mental skills: completing letter and number sequences, solving visual pattern matrices, answering verbal logic questions, and mentally rotating three-dimensional shapes.
In the second stage, participants were placed into pairs and given five minutes to work silently and independently on a social coordination puzzle titled “Gathering Food for the Winter.” The scenario asked each participant to figure out the optimal number of hours members of a hypothetical tribe should spend foraging before winter arrived. Because more hours spent foraging brought in more food but also caused greater physical exhaustion for the tribe, participants had to calculate the mathematical sweet spot that maximized food supplies while minimizing group fatigue. The researchers treated each participant’s score on this puzzle as a measure of coalitional value, since a good answer amounts to a useful planning service for the group.
Once the five minutes ended, the partners showed each other their written answers so neither person could copy the other’s work. Each person then had exactly one minute to verbally present their proposed foraging strategy and explain the reasoning behind it to their partner. Because the researchers never told participants what counted as a good or bad answer, partners had to form their own judgments about the quality of each other’s reasoning. In the final stage, the partners were separated to privately rate how intelligent they thought their partner was on the 100-average bell curve, and to evaluate their partner’s social status across three items measuring respect and admiration, leadership qualities, and usefulness as a group member on a 1-to-7 scale.
Before testing their main evolutionary predictions, the authors verified that their Norwegian translation of the cognitive test worked as intended. Using a statistical technique that groups test questions by the underlying skills they measure, they confirmed that the test showed the expected structure, capturing four specific reasoning skills as well as general intelligence, the overarching mental capacity that influences performance across diverse cognitive tasks, which accounted for nearly half of the score variation.
Across the sample, participants answered an average of 7.22 out of 16 cognitive items correctly and earned an average score of 31.37 on the winter foraging task, where scores ranged from 0 to 60 and were calculated by subtracting total tribe fatigue from the amount of food gathered. After removing two extreme outlier ratings below 70, partners estimated each other’s intelligence at an average of 104.65 and gave relatively favorable status ratings averaging 5.38 out of 7.
To analyze how intelligence, task performance, and status fit together, the scientists used a specialized statistical model designed for paired data that accounts for the mutual influence two interacting partners have on one another. Within this framework, they ran a mediation analysis, which tests whether an intermediate factor explains the link between a starting trait and a final outcome. The results showed that participants with higher cognitive test scores performed better on the winter foraging coordination task, with a standardized effect size of 0.44, a moderate association. In turn, coming up with a better foraging strategy positively predicted the social status rating received from the partner, showing a standardized effect of 0.28.
Before accounting for task performance, the overall link between cognitive test scores and the status a person received was small (0.16) and fell just short of statistical significance. Once the researchers factored in how well participants solved the foraging task, the direct link dropped to near zero (0.03), while the indirect pathway running from cognitive ability through task performance to status (0.13) was statistically significant. In statistical terms, task performance fully mediated the relationship, a pattern consistent with the idea that participants with higher test scores earned more prestige because they came up with better group strategies.
A separate analysis, which also accounted for the paired structure of the data, found that a person’s actual test score predicted their partner’s estimate of their intelligence (0.37). This suggests that people can gauge a peer’s mental ability with some accuracy after hearing them explain their reasoning for just a minute.
“Intelligence does not seem to raise a person’s rank in a group simply because others are impressed by it,” Egeland explained. “In our study, more intelligent people were granted more prestige mainly because they were better at providing something useful to the group, namely good solutions to a coordination problem. Once we accounted for this ability to benefit others, intelligence itself no longer had a meaningful direct effect on status. In other words, people seem to reward intelligence because of what it can do for the group.”
The authors argue that because deferring to someone carried costs in ancestral environments, early humans likely evolved to grant status selectively to peers who could provide benefits in return. In their view, quickly spotting who offers sound reasoning would let group members rally behind capable coordinators and share in the rewards of better collective decisions.
The study does have some limitations to keep in mind. Because a person’s cognitive ability cannot be experimentally altered in a laboratory, the study relied on an observational design, which means it cannot establish that intelligence directly caused the higher status ratings. For instance, unmeasured traits like speaking confidence, charisma, or verbal fluency during the one-minute presentation could have influenced how impressed partners felt. In addition, the participants were all Norwegian university students whose judgments were based on a two-minute exchange about a hypothetical paper-and-pencil foraging puzzle, whereas real-world reputations and hierarchies typically develop over months or years of repeated interaction.
The study also captures a present-day pattern among modern university students, so it cannot directly show why human intelligence evolved, only that the results are consistent with one evolutionary explanation. Helping a group succeed in everyday life involves many skills beyond mathematical resource optimization, such as mediating interpersonal conflicts, building alliances, and sharing cultural knowledge.
Future research will need to test whether these findings hold up in larger, more diverse populations outside of university classrooms and over longer periods of social contact. Exploring additional ways that people contribute mental effort to their teams will help clarify how different aspects of human intelligence shape social standing in the real world.
The study, “Coalitional value mediates status allocation based on cognitive ability,” was authored by Jonathan Egeland, Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair, Thomas Haarklau Kleppestø, and Mons Bendixen.