Is deference to social hierarchy a natural human trait? Off the top of my head I wouldn't know. I could see reasons for thinking there might be tendencies both ways - both towards and away from such deference. Members of our species spend, as children, a quite large proportion of their lives dependent on adults, in their care and under their authority, and this might well create deferential impulses. At the same time, growing into adults themselves, they experience the attractions of independence and freedom to make their own decisions, and we have a lot of evidence that, offered the choice between individual freedom and equality of voice within democratic processes, on the one hand, and heteronomy and being subject to the unrestrained will of dictators and the like, on the other, people tend to prefer the former to the latter.
In the Boston Globe, Drake Bennett is discussing this issue and reporting that psychologists 'have found that human beings... actually seem to thrive on a sense of social hierarchy', and that 'our tendency toward social hierarchy is at once a more deep-seated and complex impulse than we thought'. I'm in no position to contradict that. However, I will just note that Bennett simply conflates an acceptance of hierarchy for functional purposes - that is to say, having people occupy different ranks or positions in an authority structure because it leads to greater efficiency in pursuing some shared objective - and deferential impulses that are sui generis and enjoyed, so to say, just in themselves. Thus he speaks of 'a taste for rank [being] a key part of the bundle of traits that make human beings such a successfully social species' (my emphasis), but also of people feeling 'more comfortable' with a clear hierarchy 'even when our own place in it is an inferior one'. This same running together of two distinct things is evident in the following passage about Barack Obama's acceptance of General Stanley McChrystal's resignation recently:
In announcing that he had accepted McChrystal's resignation, Obama said his decision had been a necessary one, brought on by the fact that McChrystal's conduct "undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system." Civilian control of the military is spelled out in the country's Constitution to prevent the military from taking over - or even unduly influencing - the elected government. But in reasserting his authority, Obama was also addressing a more basic human need to know who is in charge.
The question is whether there is such a basic human need that is 'free-standing' - a need to feel that someone is 'in charge', independently of whether in the matter at hand there's a functional reason for having anyone in charge. A team may need a captain, and an orchestra a conductor, and a state elected leaders; but it's not obvious that we want people ranking above us in situations where they aren't required. Even if it's true (though non-obvious) that we do, it doesn't mean that this impulse should be encouraged. On the contrary, we should do all we can to distinguish between necessary hierarchies and unnecessary ones.