A new study published in Evolution and Human Behavior argues that intelligence may raise a person’s standing within a group mainly by enabling them to provide useful mental services to others. In a laboratory experiment with university students, those with higher cognitive test scores devised better solutions to a group planning puzzle, and those who proposed superior solutions received more respect from a partner after a brief exchange. The researchers describe the findings as early support for the Coalitional Intelligence Hypothesis, which posits that human intelligence evolved partly as a way to earn status by helping one’s group achieve shared goals.
In human groups, prestige is typically a form of status freely conferred through respect, admiration, and voluntary deference rather than through fear or force. Evolutionary psychologists link prestige to what they call coalitional value—the usefulness of a person to their social group or alliance in pursuing joint aims. Because living in groups depends on continual cooperation, people tend to reward those who contribute most to collective success with influence and standing.
Understanding these dynamics might illuminate why the human brain expanded so dramatically over the last two to three million years, with much of the growth in the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for planning, decision-making and flexible behaviour. While genetic analyses of ancient DNA from West Eurasia have suggested natural selection favoured cognitive-ability variants in the last ten thousand years, scientists continue to debate the specific survival or reproductive advantages at play.
Three evolving explanations compete for attention. One emphasises ecological challenges such as toolcraft and hunting, while another proposes sexual selection as a driver of intelligence. A third, increasingly influential view argues that social competition in group living shaped brainpower, selecting for individuals who could think ahead and coordinate others to outmaneuver rival groups. Proponents of the Coalitional Intelligence Hypothesis frame intelligence as a signal of one’s capacity to provide strategic mental services to the group in exchange for prestige.
“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 noted. “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.”
The researchers designed a laboratory study that paired a formal intelligence test with ratings of how much respect and admiration a partner granted the participant. The study was preregistered, with hypotheses and analysis plans publicised before data collection, to assess whether higher test scores align with greater prestige after working on a group problem, whether the link operates through problem-solving performance, and whether people can accurately judge a partner’s intelligence from a brief exchange.
Five stages of testing were conducted with 175 Norwegian university students, average age about 23, and an average of 1.6 years of college education. The sample comprised 58.3 per cent female and 38.3 per cent male participants, with the remainder identifying as another gender or not reporting. Participants formed 85 complete pairs, or dyads, and received either a cafeteria gift card worth 100 Norwegian kroner or a one-in-five chance to win movie tickets.
The experiment unfolded in three stages. First, individuals estimated where they sat on a standard bell curve of intelligence and then completed a 16-item cognitive ability test that had been translated into Norwegian and back-translated to English to verify accuracy. The test assessed four 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 paired and given five minutes to work in silence on a group coordination puzzle titled “Gathering Food for the Winter.” They had to determine the optimal number of hours tribe members should forage before winter, balancing food yields against fatigue. Each participant’s score on the puzzle served as a measure of coalitional value—the group’s useful planning service.
After the five-minute work period, partners revealed their written answers to each other, ensuring no copying. Each person then had one minute to verbally explain their proposed foraging strategy and rationale. Participants were not told what counted as a good answer; partners formed judgments about the quality of reasoning themselves. In the final stage, partners privately rated how intelligent they thought the other was on a 100-point scale and assessed their partner’s prestige with three questions measuring respect, leadership, and usefulness on a seven-point scale.
Before testing the main predictions, researchers confirmed the Norwegian translation of the cognitive test functioned as intended. Factor analysis indicated the test captured four distinct reasoning abilities alongside general intelligence, which accounted for nearly half of score variation.
Across the sample, participants answered an average of 7.22 out of 16 cognitive items correctly and scored an average of 31.37 on the winter foraging task, with scores ranging from 0 to 60. After removing two extreme outliers, partners estimated each other’s intelligence at an average of 104.65 and gave favourable prestige ratings averaging 5.38 out of 7.
To explore how intelligence, task performance, and status interrelate, the researchers employed a specialised statistical model for paired data that accounts for mutual influence between interacting partners and conducted a mediation analysis. They found that higher cognitive test scores predicted better performance on the foraging coordination task, with a standardised effect size of 0.44. In turn, better foraging-task performance predicted higher prestige ratings, with a standardised effect of 0.28.
Before accounting for task performance, the overall link between cognitive scores and the prestige a person received was 0.16 and marginally non-significant. After including task performance, the direct link dropped to 0.03, while the indirect pathway through task performance was 0.13 and statistically significant. This pattern indicates that task performance fully mediated the relationship between cognitive ability and status in this setup.
A separate analysis, also accounting for the paired data structure, found that a person’s actual test score predicted their partner’s estimate of their intelligence (0.37). This suggests that brief explanations of reasoning can give a fairly accurate read of someone’s cognitive ability.
“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 deferring to someone carried costs in ancestral environments, so early humans likely evolved to grant status selectively to peers who could provide benefits. In their view, the ability to identify capable coordinators quickly would help group members rally behind them and share in the rewards of better collective decisions.
There are limitations to the study. Because cognitive ability cannot be experimentally manipulated in a lab, the design is observational and cannot prove that intelligence directly causes higher status. Unmeasured traits such as speaking confidence, charisma or verbal fluency during the one-minute presentation could have influenced partner judgments. Moreover, the participants were Norwegian university students whose judgments were based on a brief exchange about a hypothetical foraging puzzle, whereas real-world reputations often develop over longer periods of interaction.
The researchers acknowledge the study captures a present-day pattern among university students and does not by itself demonstrate why human intelligence evolved, though it aligns with the Coalitional Intelligence Hypothesis and other accounts of group-focused functionality in intelligence. Future work will need to test whether these findings apply to larger and more diverse populations and across longer social contact, as researchers seek to understand how different facets of human intelligence shape social standing in everyday life.
The study was authored by Jonathan Egeland, Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair, Thomas Haarklau Kleppestø, and Mons Bendixen under the title “Coalitional value mediates status allocation based on cognitive ability.”
