Rank also helps coordinate action, enabling members of the group to do better together than on their own. For instance, traveling in a pack helps African wild dogs bring down large game and defend the meal from thieving lions and hyenas, so everybody gets more to eat. But they don’t necessarily all get the same amount. The dominant male and female typically take first pass at any meal. Thus subordinates often end up hungry enough to risk leading the hunt for the pack’s next kill. (In human terms, the broker who’s only making $80,000 may jump at a potential client faster than the one who’s making $300,000.) From a Darwinian perspective, the unfairness of the pack hierarchy functions to improve fitness. Of course, from the alpha’s perspective, unfairness, not evolutionary fitness, is really the point. Individuals struggle to become alpha males or females because rank brings privileges.
Social rank is so important in the animal world that it leaves a mark not just on behavior, but on flesh-and-blood physiology. Mice, for example, can literally smell dominance. They can identify the scent-markings of a male who has previously defeated them, and it makes them creep around on flattened bellies, wondering: “Is the alpha mouse that whomped me near enough to do it again?” Subordinate males often display stress-heightened levels of the hormone cortisol, resulting at times in “psychological castration.” Subordinate male mice, for instance, have depressed sperm levels.
But does any of this translate to humans? One major difference is that social dominance in the animal world is largely about brute force. A wolf, for instance, typically gets to be the alpha male in his pack by demonstrating an ability to chew off the ears of subordinates, and he reminds them of this talent by frequent snarling. This is probably not what Al Gore’s campaign adviser had in mind when she advised him last fall to act more like an alpha male. Humans who routinely use physical aggression get our attention only for as long as it takes to put them in jail. A certain lingering regard for physical prowess may have figured in Jesse Ventura’s strange climb from the wrestling ring to the Minnesota governor’s residence. But even Ventura has had to learn that man does not become president by body slams alone. Moreover, dominance in the animal world seems to be mainly about males fighting to win females. For instance, in one study of northern elephant seals, four percent of all males—the winners of bloody dominance battles—did 85 percent of the mating. But the evidence connecting dominance with mating success is more ambiguous in humans. When University of Michigan researcher Laura Betzig reviewed the first six great civilizations—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Aztec, Incan, Indian, and Chinese—she found in each case that powerful men used their status to mate with as many women as possible. Even in the more restrained circumstances of Christian Europe, Charlemagne had five successive wives and four concubines. Half of modern Europe can thus claim him as an ancestor.
With exceptions, however, powerful men in the modern world do not keep harems. Bill Gates may control more wealth than any emperor of China, but he espouses monogamy. Bill Clinton may be the most powerful person in the world, but infidelity brought him mortifying public disgrace. Evolution may predispose us to translate power into sexual opportunity, but we pass sexual harassment laws to thwart this sort of dominance behavior in the workplace. The evolutionary heritage of being physically aggressive and stockpiling sexual partners may also seem remote to the women who increasingly head nations and Fortune 500 companies.
A few researchers like Bernstein believe these differences are so significant we should not be talking about dominance in humans at all. But when scientists set out in the 1970s and ‘80s to ask whether social dominance matters in our species, they discovered to their surprise that some sort of hierarchy appears almost automatically in groups of children in countries around the world, usually before age three. It isn’t simply a matter of males competing for females. It’s part of the underlying fabric of our minds, a product of 10 million years in which the primates have been evolving as social species, and none more social than ourselves. Disputes among young children in these studies were generally of the “my toy” variety, and, unlike adults, the dominant individuals routinely used aggression to take control. As in the animal world, the aggression became less overt once dominance was established.
Dominant adults typically stand straighter and move more expansively, much as the alpha male in a wolf pack walks with head and tail erect. Even their handwriting often has a sweeping John Hancock character, according to Glenn Weisfeld, a psychologist at Wayne State University. Eye contact also counts. One way to assess who’s dominant in a conversation, says Weisfeld, is to consider the ratio of “look-speak over look-listen.” Dominant individuals generally make eye contact when they’re speaking, but look away when subordinates are speaking to them.
Body language is at times almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. In one study of small children, dominant individuals typically entered a confrontation with eyebrows raised and chin up, making full eye contact with their opponents. This so-called “plus face” helped produce a win 66 percent of the time; the “minus face,” with eyes down and chin lowered, produced a win less than ten percent of the time. The “plus face” actually seemed to stop subordinate children in their tracks. And something similar seems to happen in adults too. By displaying his “maniacal passion,” Netscape founder Jim Clark became “the guy who always won the game of chicken because his opponents suspected he might actually enjoy a head-on collision.”
So is dominance simply a matter of putting on the right face? Aren’t primates too adept at weeding out fakers for that? To be convincing, dominance may need to be rooted deep in our hormones. Testosterone, for example, has become notorious as the supposed cause of male aggression, a sort of “raging bull” hormone. But studies have repeatedly demonstrated that testosterone levels in a group of men actually predict nothing about who will display aggression. In one recent study of grade-schoolers, elevated testosterone levels weren’t associated with aggression at all, but with social success—dominance.
