Dominance hierarchy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A dominance hierarchy or social hierarchy is an organizational form by which individuals within a community control the distribution of resources within the community. Dominance hierarchies are formed when a group of individuals belonging to the same species share a territory.
Dominance hierarchies can be despotic or linear. In a despotic hierarchy, one individual controls all the other individuals. In a linear hierarchy, of which the classic example of pecking order in hens is often cited, each individual has a rank in the hierarchy.
Dominance hierarchies occur in most social animal species, including primates who normally live in groups. Dominance hierarchies have been extensively studied in fish, birds, and mammals. Dominance hierarchies can be simple linear structures, which often arise from the physical differences among individuals in a group in relation to their access to resources. They are also influenced by the complex social interactions among individuals in the group.
It has been postulated that paired interactions alone can not account for the emergence of dominance hierarchies. Such phenomena as the audience effect, the context-dependent audience effect in Betta splendens, the observer effect, and the winner-loser effect, may play important roles in the formation of dominance hierarchies in social groups. The social group forms a complex signaling network: interaction that occur among just two individuals of the group are in turn affected by other signals transmitted by individuals in direct communication with them.
Individuals with greater hierarchical status tend to displace those ranked lower from access to space, to food and to mating opportunities. Thus individuals with higher social status tend to have greater reproductive success by mating more often and having more resources to invest in the survival of offspring.
These hierarchies are not fixed and depend on any number of changing factors, among them are age, gender, body size, intelligence, and aggressiveness. Status may also be affected by the ability to marshal the support of others. Indeed, the need to maintain social position and social knowledge may be an impetus for the evolution of larger brains in humans.[1]
Thus, dominance hierarchies can also be observed in human societies and are important phenomena to understand the organization of family, tribe or clan, work organizations, politics, etc. in normal and abnormal social situations. It is not clear how much of dominance hierarchy in humans is due to the intrinsic biology of our brains, derived from evolution, and how much is due to cultural factors.
[edit] References
Chase I., Tovey C., Spangler-Martin D., Manfredonia M. 2002. Individual differences versus social dynamics in the formation of animal dominance hierarchies. PNAS 99 (9): 5744-5749.
Chase I., Bartolomeo C.,Dugatkin L. 1994. Aggressive interactions and inter-contest interval: how long do winners keep winning?. Animal Behaviour 48 (2): 393-400
Cummins D.D., Dominance Hierarchies and the Evolution of Human Reasoning. Minds and Machines, Volume 6, Number 4, November 1996, pp. 463-480(18)
Oliveira RF, McGregor P. K., Latruffe C. 1998. Know thine enemy: fighting fish gather information from observing conspecific interactions. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 265: 1045-1049.
Wilson, E. O. Sociobiology. 2000.
