How Dominance Hierarchies Work
How do dominance hierarchies, as governing structures, function? What does a governing structure ruled by dominance hierarchies look like? To investigate it in its purest form, a form we are all familiar with to some extent, let’s look to a middle school clique. Dominance-hierarchy-based decision-making manifests with unique purity in this setting, as the participants have yet to develop the life experience and myelination of their frontal lobes necessary to muffle the more toxic aspects of dominance hierarchies.[[54]](#_ftn54)
Members of middle school cliques commonly sort themselves by an unseen metric we will call their “social rank”—essentially, their position within their local dominance hierarchy. The preferences and opinions of those with a higher social rank are weighted more heavily when the group is making a decision—thus when the group needs to decide on something, all individuals willing to voice an opinion will voice it and a final decision will be made by the individual with highest social rank who is willing to voice an opinion. This social rank is specific to every tribal group, so a girl may have one social rank among the goths and another among the cheerleaders, but more on that later.
What happens when an individual of a lower social rank refuses to follow the individual with the highest social rank? What if they try to get others in the group to go with their choice instead? This creates a dominance challenge—one of the core ways an individual can move up within the hierarchy and attain a higher social rank. If the challenged individual stands down and defers to the influence of the lower-status challenger their social rank will decrease while the challenger’s social rank will increase. (It should be already obvious why this form of governance is toxic—even if a higher-status individual realizes they made a suboptimal judgment, they can still lose social status by conceding that point.)
Because humans who maintained a higher social rank could secure higher quality mates and have more kids, strong evolutionary pressures now lead the average person to act in a way that keeps their social rank as high as possible. These pressures mean that when a person of high social rank feels their authority is challenged, they will experience an unconscious, instinctive impulse to socially punish the individual who challenged them. In so doing, they make threats to their dominance costlier in the future and shore up their social rank. They will punish the individual even when they don’t care that much about the opinion the individual voiced because the point isn’t about getting their way on that particular issue, it’s about defending social rank.
The hazards of challenging a dominance hierarchy do not end there. Challengers will be met with punishment not just from the dominant member challenged, but also from supporters of the status quo. Supporters strengthen their bonds with the challenged individual through this behavior. While they could theoretically support the challenger instead, treason is rare because one gains more by ingratiating oneself with higher-status individuals. If you supported me today, I will remember that and support you tomorrow—this sort of reciprocity is critical even within the dominance hierarchy of chimp tribes.
By supporting the challenged individual, supporters also ensure that such attempts do not happen as frequently in the future, which reinforces their own status within the hierarchy (a smart thing to do when you have a high social rank yourself). This is why individuals that are slightly senior to the challenged individual in a hierarchy are those most likely to execute socially punishing behavior upon a challenger.
These behavioral impulses fuel much of what is perceived as bullying behavior in both humans and great apes. These instincts also explain in part why studies have consistently shown that bullying behavior happens more within friend groups than between them.[[55]](#_ftn55)
Let’s explore a brief example to demonstrate how this plays out: A group of middle school girls is trying to decide where to eat. Becky, social rank 90, has suggested Mexican food, after which Olivia, social rank 30, suggests Old Man’s Crab Shack. By floating this suggestion after the higher status individual made her preference known, Olivia has issued a challenge to Becky’s position within the hierarchy. If the group follows Olivia’s suggestion, Olivia’s social rank within that group will increase while Becky’s will decrease.
Generally speaking, the higher someone’s social rank is within a group, the less they want to see the positions of people within said group disrupted, as normalizing disruption in the social hierarchy puts them at risk, so Brenda (social rank 100) may respond to Olivia with a socially punishing comments like, “only fat people eat at Old Man’s Crab Shack—it’s disgusting.” Now that the rest of the group sees Becky and Brenda form this alliance against the weaker party, they may jump in as well in an attempt to further diminish Olivia’s social rank and bolster their own relative position within the group. The group will not want to go so far that Olivia leaves over something small like this, as the more members they have in the group, the more powerful the group becomes overall—so the extent of the social punishment (bullying) is often moderated.
In other great apes, such disputes, in which a low-ranking individual challenges a high-ranking individual, are often resolved through dominance displays like puffing one’s self up or “getting in someone’s face”—and when those fail, violence. To see this behavior in humans, imagine a drunk guy at a bar adopting “the stance” after a perceived slight, saying “What, you think you are better than me?!” and getting in his perceived opponent’s personal space. It is difficult to find a more perfect example of a great ape dominance challenge. Not only is he literally puffing himself up to look larger; he is explicitly stating he is doing this because the other person may believe they are “better” than him (a surprisingly articulate expression of the impulse created by such an ancient part of his brain). While we may default to these ape-like strategies when our brains are impaired, most humans prefer to carry out hierarchy battles through social challenges.
When people are young, inexperienced, or otherwise cognitively impaired, these dominance challenges often look like those delineated above. However, as people get older and more socially experienced, dominance challenges can be as subtle as a pause between words during a board meeting.
Individuals who feel confident in their position within a hierarchy are more likely to express their dominance by making decisions on behalf of the group. When an individual makes a decision on behalf of a group and no one objects, their social rank increases slightly, but in every decision they make, they risk being challenged and having their social rank drop dramatically. Conversely, an individual who is uncertain of their place within a dominance hierarchy will be much less likely to push for things they themselves want, while being more likely to “bully” individuals who challenge the existing dominance structure.
Essentially, every time an individual asserts their dominance within a group, they are making a calculated bet that no one will challenge them or that if someone does most of the group will back them. Individuals are less likely to make this bet if they are unsure about the dominance order of the group. In such unclear scenarios, people are more likely to expend social capital to establish a predictable chain of dominance through choosing sides in other individuals’ dominance battles.
An inability to recognize these hierarchies is the core cause of habitual bullying. A low-ranking individual issues a challenge to higher status individuals when they ignore their requests or fail to signal deference. Whether the low-ranking individual wants this to be taken as a challenge or not is beside the point. The higher-status individual is essentially left with no choice but to socially punish the low-ranking individual or compromise their own position within the hierarchy (especially if they are insecure in their position). This can create a cycle, lowering an individual’s social rank to almost nothing and in so doing making smaller and smaller failures to display deference worth punishing (the wider the difference in social rank between challengers, the more damage can be done).
This is why, “stand up for yourself” and “just ignore them” are two of the dumbest pieces of advice you can give to an individual being bullied. The proliferation of this advice likely contributes significantly to the current bullying epidemic. Ignoring the request of a high-ranking individual presents a direct challenge to their authority in that it suggests a failure to recognize their social rank, and challenges to high-ranking individuals are likely to fail due to the social support they typically receive. Instead, if a child is being habitually bullied, they should either be coached to learn their place within the existing social hierarchy and work their way out of it incrementally or join an alternate social hierarchy—like the goth kids.
Why do we say: “Become a goth?” When a goth kid ignores a preppy kid’s orders, he is not challenging that individual’s dominance within the preppy group. Social challenges are less necessary between individuals competing in different hierarchies, as a goth kid ignoring a preppy kid is more of a “tribal group challenge” than an individual dominance challenge. A preppy kid claiming authority over a goth kid can be interpreted as claiming that his group, preppies in this case, maintains authority over goths. This kind of challenge is one even fairly high-ranking people within most groups won’t risk aggressively making, as it challenges every individual of the other group and in this case might lead to all of the goths building animosity towards the preppy group. Moreover, instigating needless group conflict puts the aggressor at risk of losing status within their own group.
While we are discussing social rank in the context of middle school, remember that this method of group decision making exists as the shadow governing structure of almost any setting you’ll need to navigate, be it an office, family office board, or town council. Its existence is masked as people mature and engage in dominance challenges with more competence and guile. Groups just like this exist in the congressional cafeteria and among the President’s advisors. The ways these groups interact through pre-programmed dominance challenges has a massive impact on the national policy of every country in the world.
For example, presidential advisors’ decisions over where to eat or who to date may affect their social status in a way that alters their relative social rank, which in turn affects national policy. The monkey part of our brain does not understand the difference between a social battle over lunch and one over fiscal policy and will weigh them not based on their absolute importance but on emotional states associated with them.