Dominance and Submission

The Origins of Dominance

Dominance as a characteristic of individuals almost surely has a genetic basis. This conclusion is supported by three lines of evidence.

First, it is possible to breed for dominance. Behavior geneticists developed strains of dominant mice and rats after World War II. Moreover, terriers dominate beagles, and every tropical fish fancier knows that certain fish species dominate other species.

Second, every flock of chickens has a pecking order, every herd of cows has a lead cow, and every wolf pack has lead males and females. All troops of social primates are organized in terms of dominance hierarchies. The principal social dynamic in a chimpanzee troop concerns coalition building as subordinates try to overthrow the lead male. The fact that chimpanzees are humans' nearest living primate relatives—the two share over 90 percent of their genes—makes this an interesting perspective on human social behavior.

One should note that in animal interactions, from lizards to chimpanzees, dominance is almost identical to aggressiveness. Animals establish dominance by intimidating or physically defeating their competitors. Among the primates and especially the chimpanzees, matters are more complex. Two male chimpanzees can always defeat a single animal; the lead chimpanzee is the one who can attract the most support from other chimpanzees in his aggressive encounters with competitors.

Third, developmental psychologists Patricia Hawley [Page 356]and Ted Little (1999) studied toddlers in New Haven, Connecticut, in free-play situations. They report three important findings. First, almost as soon as the toddlers were mobile, some tried to dominate others, largely by taking their toys away from them. Second, at some point in the three-to-four-year-old age range, a kind of status hierarchy developed, and the high-status (popular) children were defined as the ones the other children watched. Third, about this time, the children who tried to preempt the toys of the others (i.e., the dominant children) separated into two groups. The first group of dominant children continued to take toys away by force, and these children were not well liked by the others. The second group, the popular children, would approach another child and say something like, “Let's you and me play with your toy.” The approached child, happy to play with the popular child, would then be willing to share his or her toy. This seems to reflect the origins of something like prosocial and antisocial dominance, where prosocial dominance is associated with social skill, and antisocial dominance is associated with raw aggression.

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