Jim Clark was 38 when he set out to reinvent himself. He had just lost his job as a professor at the New York Institute of Technology, and his second wife had left him. Describing this low point to Michael Lewis, author of The New New Thing, Clark says he was suddenly possessed with "a maniacal passion . . . to achieve something." And he did: In the years since then, Clark, now 55, has created three multibillion-dollar computer companies, including Netscape. In the process he has made himself and the people around him unbelievably rich.

But how? What does it take to become a dominant individual in human society? How do we identify our alpha males and females and decide to give them our allegiance? Our would-be leaders don’t butt heads like rival elk. They don’t signal their ascent from beta to alpha status by turning bright blue, as do males from one species of African cichlid fish.

Dominance is almost invisible in human affairs and yet arguably present everywhere. Pay attention and you can see it in the stir that runs through a room when a pretty or powerful woman enters, or in the body language of a man running into his boss at the shopping mall. In such situations, humans invariably size one another up as quickly and ruthlessly as grade schoolers choosing sides in a pickup basketball game. Every time two people meet, some scientists say, the question of dominance or submission gets answered in the way one person holds eye contact and the other glances away, or in the way one unconsciously shifts vocal tone to match the other. (See “Power Hum”, pg TK.) Trying to figure out who’s in charge is almost as natural for us as breathing.

But does a term like alpha male, coined in 1935 to describe the leader of a wolf pack, make any sense in a human context? Does dominance itself, a concept first put forward early in the twentieth century by a Norwegian researcher studying chickens, have anything to do with human society? Do we really have pecking orders?

Unlike animals, we don’t generally spend the bulk of our lives in a single herd or pack. We move routinely from one hierarchy to another, from vice president of operations to anxious newcomer in the PTA, from assistant librarian to head of the local soup kitchen, from alpha to omega and back again, all in the course of a day, or even an hour.

And yet research suggests that there are rules by which we recognize our alphas. As in Jim Clark’s case, it is certainly about demonstrating the will to “accomplish something.” But our understanding of the means by which we achieve dominance is quickly changing. Researchers no longer assume that reaching the top of the social heap is necessaily about aggression—the candidate jabbing his hand in a rival’s face, the boss barking at his secretary. Instead, they’ve come to recognize that the genuine leader is just as likely to be the candidate who turns away with a smile and a casual joke, or the boss who cajoles her subordinates into beating their quarterly targets. Some biologists and social scientists now suggest that, quite unlike animals, humans can become dominant by making friends, building alliances, or deploying the gentle forces of compromise and persuasion.

Astonishingly, no one has ever attempted a systematic study of dominance in humans who are older than seven, which is partly explained by the fact that scientists can’t agree what dominance means in animals. Researchers use four different definitions to identify the dominant animal in a group: the one who can beat up everybody else but doesn’t necessarily need to (remind anyone of Jesse Ventura?); the one who displays the most aggression (a snarling Pat Buchanan?); the one to whom other members of the group pay the most attention (Donald Trump?); or  the one who gets first pass at resources like food, sex, or a nice place to sleep (Bill Clinton?). The obvious problem with these four definitions is that the same animal could easily turn up as the alpha in one study and the beta in another.

Even if everyone agreed on the same definition, dominance among animals can vary according to the species, the individual, or even the day of the week. A dominant rhesus with a full belly may let a subordinate take away his meal, says Irwin Bernstein, a University of Georgia psychologist, and a female bored by her alpha male may slip away for a fling with a hot young beta.

Dominat Individuals typically entered a confrontation with eyebrows raised making full eye contact with their opponents

Dominance may be ill-defined and unpredictable, but most researchers still believe that it dictates the terms of daily life—whether in a pack of wolves stretching and greeting one another at dawn, or in an office full of brokers heading for their trading desks at 7 a.m. Scientists view social hierarchy as a necessary evil allowing any group to function more effectively. It’s why committees have chairpersons. Sorting out rank in the first place can be perilous for everyone. So it pays to settle on a hierarchy and then avoid further bloodshed by acknowledging rank with gestures of dominance or submission: The boss preens and tells bad jokes. His subordinates gather around and laugh appreciatively.

The alternative is to squabble endlessly about who ought to be in charge. In one study, researchers left the pecking order in some chicken flocks undisturbed. But they deliberately unsettled other flocks week after week by removing whichever bird had struggled to the top. The flocks with undisturbed hierarchies not only did less bickering, but also ate more food, gained weight faster, and produced more eggs.

Full text of this article appears in Discover magazine.





For more about Patricia Hawley's work on dominance behavior in children, see "The Ontogenesis of Social Dominance: A Strategy-Based Evolutionary Perspective," Developmental Review, March 1999 (available on-line at www.idealibrary.com).