One morning when he was around two weeks old, Shrink awoke to the feeling of his mother’s teeth on the nape of his neck. He squirmed but she held him fast as she wriggled him out of the only home he’d known in his young life. Shrink bounced along, carried by Beba, under the still-dark sky. When she finally came to a stop and dropped him to the ground, Shrink could sense movement around him. He could tell that his twin sister was there, but so were other, unfamiliar hyenas. He may have heard whimpering and growls. His mother left him there and trotted away.
Shrink didn’t know it, but this was his first day of the next phase of hyena development: life in the communal den. After two or three weeks alone with their mothers and any siblings, spotted hyena cubs are brought to a single, shared den along with every other hyena cub in the clan, from the princesses and princelings on down to the offspring of the lowest-ranking adults. Shrink and his sister were there and so was Meregesh, son of Queen Mafuta. In this communal hyena daycare, the young animals’ social lives expand, and they begin to understand their place in the wider order of the clan.
In the communal den, the young hyenas spend long days and nights together without adult supervision. Their mothers visit their cubs regularly once or twice a day to nurse, but the cubs are generally left alone to battle and bully, play and range freely.
For Beba, although relieved of the constant demand of her hungry and undernourished twins, this new phase was a different kind of struggle. Already forced to live at the margins of her group, pushed to pour her scanty resources into finding food and defending herself, Beba couldn’t visit the hyena daycare as often as the other mothers could. When she did, she couldn’t provide for her cubs as lavishly. She came regularly to nurse, but barely had enough milk for one hungry hyena, much less two. Parched and starving, Shrink was often shoved out of the way by his sister when their mother came to visit.
Queen Mafuta, on the other hand, visited several times a day. She was overflowing with milk and Meregesh ate copiously. Mafuta also brought Meregesh extra treats of meat, something the lower-status mothers couldn’t.
For Shrink, his twin sister, Prince Meregesh, and their other cub-peers, the first few days in the communal den were probably intimidating, according to field scientists who’ve studied this period. After being left by their mothers, hyena cubs are tentative and easily spooked. They cower at anything that moves—even stalks of grass blowing in the wind or stray insects walking by. But soon, they begin challenging and attacking instead of submitting to the things that disturb them, and that includes their fellow cubs. They begin play-fighting, and in these early encounters the young hyenas rack up wins and losses based on a set of ranking characteristics consistent across animal groups.
HOW HIERARCHIES HAPPEN
How the status and ranks of individuals are determined within groups varies across species. But some characteristics are widespread in nature. The following are some of the common criteria that influence where an individual lands in a hierarchy.
Size
Physical size is a major predictor of status rank in many animal societies. From birds to fish, crustaceans to mammals, and even in some spiders, being larger contributes to higher rank. For some animals, size is not as important; for a female hyena, family ties and social networks mean much more than her body mass. For male hyenas, size is less important than kinship, social networks, and age.
Age
Getting older is a status booster in many animals. Age confers higher rank in feral ponies, African elephants, mountain goats, meerkats, chimps, bottlenose dolphins, and humans. For growing animals, size and age are connected. Older siblings usually dominate younger siblings, at least until a certain age. Gap years and redshirting, which allow humans to gain a year before competing in the next stage of academics or sports, may have their origins in this age-based bump seen across the animal kingdom. Seniority—hanging around long enough for competition to leave or die and then replacing them as the next-oldest—also improves opportunities to inherit territory. And the extra time allows younger individuals to learn crucial life skills by watching older, more experienced animals. Shrink’s youth was another strike against him. A male hyena’s age and status are tightly linked. Males have to wait years to work their way up the status ladder, unless their friends and alliances can give them a leg up.
Grooming
Attractiveness—even physical beauty—can raise status among human beings. But animals, too, have what Darwin called “a taste for the beautiful.” Displays of splendor in male animals have been viewed primarily as advertisements of desirable genetics and access to resources, aimed at choosy females. For flamingos, as an example, bright orange-pink feathers billboard a diet high in healthy carotenes. Looking at those vibrant feathers, a potential mate would know that this male had fine genetics and feasted regularly on the best shrimp. A paler gray bird would suggest the opposite. Of course, access to good food can be an environmental issue, well out of the control or agency of the animal individual.
Some of the same physical features that draw in mates are also status symbols in same-sex hierarchies. A black swan’s elaborately curled wing feathers may help him attract females, but the ruffle also signals high social status to other males.
Another element that seems to enhance attractiveness, and raise status, is grooming. The best-groomed birds, fish, and primates tend to be the highest-ranking. They also tend to be the healthiest, physically. Receiving grooming from other animals in one’s group is a benefit of high rank. Schjelderup-Ebbe recognized the grooming gap between birds who sported “bright, sleek, beautiful, and clean plumage” and those at the low end of the pecking order with “rumpled, disordered plumage, often with dirt hanging to it.”
Lower-ranked individuals may physically groom higher-ranking animals in exchange for resources such as protection and food, and also to boost their own status through association. Watching who grooms whom in groups of fish, birds, and mammals can help observers get a good sense of status relationships. It doesn’t take much to spot this same trend among humans and to realize how much grooming is associated with status. Humans can use words as a kind of social grooming. Compliments trigger neurochemical responses that are similar to the ones produced by physical grooming. Humans can use praise and flattery the way animals use plucking, rubbing, and nibbling to curry favor of dominants in the group. Extending this concept of “spoken grooming” to social media, one can discern hierarchies from who does the posting and who does the liking.
Like other well-groomed, high-ranking animals, top hyenas are less blemished than others—perhaps in part because lower-ranking animals don’t dare attack them. But high-ranking hyenas also have superior immune systems, receive more grooming from others, and thus have lower parasite loads.
Sex
Finally, an animal’s sex (what has been called gender in humans) factors into status in some fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Females are the dominant sex in some species, males in others. Schools of colorful tropical clownfish form hierarchies with a dominant female always at the top. The benefits for the fish in the highest position are great. So much so that if the female clownfish dies and the position opens up, subordinate males will transform themselves into females in order to compete for a shot at occupying the top spot. It takes them about forty days to transition from male to female, a process that involves doubling in size and converting testicular tissue to ovarian.
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Many factors contribute to why males or females dominate certain animal societies. While biology plays a role, environmental conditions—food availability, predator density—are also important.
Shrink could do nothing about his genetic inheritances—his sex, age, birth order, size, attractiveness, or parents.
But he still had a chance. Animal behavior, some of it innate but some that can be learned and adapted to their advantage, plays a considerable role in shaping an animal’s status. For Shrink, these tried-and-true behavioral techniques turned out to be his key to survival.
ASSOCIATION WITH HIGH-STATUS ANIMALS
Spotted hyenas like Shrink spend a great deal of time with their blood relatives. But when they aren’t with kin, they prefer hanging around with animals at their social rank or higher.
Many primates, including several species of baboons, macaques, vervet monkeys, and of course humans prefer high-ranking social companions to low-ranking individuals. Status strongly influences affiliations and friendships among horses and cattle in herds. High-ranking dairy cows choose stalls next to one another and follow closely behind other members of their cow clique when walking in lines. An animal’s rank makes it more appealing as an alliance partner and sometimes even as a sex partner. Male bison, for example, may show little interest in a middle- or low-ranking female, preferring to mate with the high-ranking females in the herd. And since higher-ranking animals are often in close physical proximity to one another, just standing, grazing, or lounging next to admired members of the herd may be a status booster.
Association with high-status animals—and the reflected glory of advertising those friends—may be the biological drive behind posting a selfie from an in-crowd party or displaying a shelf full of photos with politicians and celebrities. Letters of recommendation, name-dropping in conversation, and lunching with popular students or colleagues accomplish similar purposes. The power of association to raise status also likely underlies the attraction to high-profile companies, prestigious schools, winning sports teams, and elite branches of military and public service.
SIGNS OF STATUS
Besides hanging out with the popular crowd, some animals also carry props to show off their status. Luxe fur, glamorous feathers, splendidly elaborate horns, inconveniently long tails—these all attest to the riches backing up the animals who own them. Energy and time must be devoted to maintaining plush pelage and beautiful skin and dragging around other wild accessories like enormous antler racks. These animal social signifiers, called “status badges” by biologists, tell the animal’s peers, “I am special.” Flaunting status badges shows off an individual’s genetics, social networks, and grooming resources. Knowing the money and time humans expend on propping up our status, perhaps it’s not surprising to learn that animals without resources can sometimes fake their way up a hierarchy by flashing faux status badges. A fiddler crab that loses his one massive claw in a fight will plunge down the hierarchy. He can grow a new one, but it’s lighter weight and not as effective in battle. Still, waving his ersatz claw, he can fool the other crabs into thinking his fake weapon is the real thing. Unless he’s called out, and forced to fight with his mock cudgel, he can usually claw his way back up the hierarchy.
In a display case in the Mesoamerican hall at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, next to an elaborately carved jade head and a ceramic jaguar bowl, sits a gold pendant about the size of your thumbnail. We spotted it one day as we were searching the museum for artifacts that indicated high social rank. This particular case held items treasured by elite members of the Late Classic Maya period, a time of hereditary kings, grand public architecture, and advancements in astronomical thought.
Mayans, who lived around one to four thousand years ago, were as status-conscious, just as we are today, and as Shrink’s clan was in 1998. And the pendant carries clues to that. Carved into the gold is the figure of an adolescent young man in profile, his head topped by an enormous headdress radiating like a sun. Headdresses like these were decorated to resemble revered animals such as jaguars or falcons and often adorned with quetzel feathers. Mayan headdresses were high-status items, and commoners were forbidden from wearing them. Around the youth’s waist is a decorative shield with an ornamental stone ax head called a hacha, thought to have been used in a Classic Maya ceremonial ballgame called pitz. Pitz players were usually elites, and the games were watched by thousands of people in arena-like stadiums. Like many universities today, Mayan culture prized athletes, particularly athletes who could combine brains and beauty. All of these symbols indicate this adolescent’s honored place in his society. This young man was like a Heisman Trophy winner of the eighth century, and the pendant with his likeness would likely have been used as an offering at an elite burial.
Anthropologist and archaeologist Stephen Houston, an expert on Maya civilization, suggests in his 2018 book The Gifted Passage that adolescent males, perhaps because they were potentially heirs, held positions of notably high status in Mayan society. Images of adolescent males are widespread on many Mayan ceramics, hieroglyphics, and murals. High-status elites enjoyed perks in Mayan society that included living in large houses in central locations, wearing fashionable clothing and accessories, and regularly eating meat and drinking chocolate—a rare treat for commoners.
For all the extra food, comforts, and luxury items, Mayan nobility came with a distinct disadvantage: rules governing warfare among groups of Mayan clans often required royals to be the first into battle.
Similarly, in fights with other clans, and in defending the group from lions, hyena queens must be first to offer their lives for the cause. Death by lion is one of the commonest ends to the reigns of hyena alphas. In these moments of drama and violence, the clear succession of hyena hierarchies can be very useful to the group. Because everyone knows their place in the hierarchy so well, the leader-in-waiting, the second-highest-ranking princess or prince, can step in immediately upon the death of the alpha, and transition is seamless. Höner and other hyena experts have observed clans accept a transfer of power, even during the gore of battle, when a female is killed and her daughter steps in to take her place before the fight has even been won.
THE GESTURES AND SOUNDS OF STATUS
Because life is potentially physically and socially more dangerous for them, subordinate animals are more edgy, vigilant, and nervous. A low-status wolf betrays his rank with darting eyes and gestures of submission. His shoulders slump. He bows his head and licks his lips. In contrast, the movements of higher-ranking wolves tend to be more purposeful. Motionless and unblinking, they’re more likely to make bold or hostile movements, such as chasing other group members and lunging with open mouths.
Starting very early, as young as four weeks, Shrink would have been learning the body language of hyena status. Higher-ranking individuals like Meregesh would learn to keep their tails upright and ears cocked, whereas lower-ranking individuals would be expected to keep their tails between their legs, ears backward, teeth bared, and head downward. Performing these behaviors in ritualized greeting ceremonies confirms status relationships and strengthens friendships.
Studies of dominance gestures in humans show similar differences between the relaxed posture and steady eye gazes of dominants and superfluous body movements and darting eyes of subordinates. Higher-ranking humans tend to show their status in verbal language that is quicker, more confident, and more enunciated. They interrupt more too.
Frans de Waal, the author and primatologist, describes in Our Inner Ape how the human voice reveals status cues that may seem subtle but are powerfully, if intuitively, understood. The pitch of your voice, he writes, is an “unconscious social instrument” that betrays your position in the hierarchy. Everyone has a personal pitch, but, “in the course of a conversation, people tend to converge.” They settle on a single pitch, de Waal explains, “and it is always the lower status person who does the adjusting.” As de Waal writes, the Larry King Live talk show provided a demonstration of this effect. “The host, Larry King, would adjust his timbre to that of high-ranking guests, like Mike Wallace or Elizabeth Taylor. Low-ranking guests, on the other hand, would adjust their timbre to that of King.”
Younger adolescents with their higher-pitched voices may often find themselves vocally jockeying to be heard. And older adolescent males may notice their status in the home or classroom changing along with their deepening voices.
Spotted hyenas are famous for a particular vocalization: their high-pitched, staccato hoot-laugh, or giggle, that gives them the nickname “laughing hyenas.” Although this distinctive sound has long been attributed to all hyenas, in fact it’s a marker of lower status, made by subordinate animals who are communicating with higher-ranking members of the group. A team of Berkeley psychobiologists presenting to an acoustics conference in 2008 reported that giggles are made by “distressed, or submissive, animals in situations where they are both excited and conflicted between approaching and leaving the situation. For example . . . submissive individuals at a kill waiting their turn while being chased away by higher ranking animals.”
While the characteristic giggle is made mostly by lower-ranking hyenas, all hyenas produce many different sounds. One of them, the so-called whoop, is a loud, long-distance communication call that starts low and swoops up and down in pitch. Every hyena’s whoop is distinctive, and scientists like Höner can learn to identify individuals by them. Notably, the Berkeley team also reported findings that “immigrant males who are approaching a new clan produce a high number of whoops as to carefully advertise their arrival into a group that could potentially reject them.”
Shrink was going to use every tactic he could muster, including vocalizations. Besides high-status associates, status badges, body language, and voice, there was another asset he was developing as he progressed through adolescence. It’s called the Social Brain Network.
THE SOCIAL BRAIN NETWORK
Discerning one’s place in hierarchies is critical for humans and other social species. Specialized brain cells and regions dedicated to social awareness and function are found in fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Collectively, these systems are called the Social Brain Network (SBN).
In mammals, the SBN is housed in six separate but linked regions of the brain. Picture one of those maps in the back of an airline’s in-flight magazine, showing where in the world the airline flies. Glowing hubs and arching lines indicate planes landing and taking off all over the globe. Imagine your brain as the world and your social brain—the SBN—consisting of six of those hubs, connected and communicating at all times. The six hubs bring together visual input, stored social memories, fear associations, hormonal information, coping behaviors, and logical decision-making.
Anytime you’re with or thinking about other people, your Social Brain Network is active. It helps you process facial expressions, make sense of body language, assess others’ emotional states, and interpret tones of voice. SBNs allow you to read a room, make a sale, know when to walk away, and know when to run. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this neural network to daily human life: abnormalities in SBN development have been linked to brain and social deficit conditions, including autism spectrum disorder. Brain injury may impair the SBN’s ability to regulate social function. Inappropriate laughter, public displays of sexual behavior, reduced empathy, and out-of-character temper tantrums have all been seen in patients with brain tumors or injuries affecting regions of the SBN.
Our ability to understand and connect not only with other humans but also with cats and dogs, birds and horses, points to our common ancestry as social animals. A dog’s social brain helps it decode where it ranks at the dog park and possibly within its human family too. Recent studies of dog-human communication have shown that the same regions in the social brains of both are activated when hearing emotional voices of either species. The ability of an experienced equestrienne to sense the emotional state of her horse seems to be reciprocal. Evidence that horses can read their riders, too, suggests interaction between horse and human social brains.
STATUS MAPPING
The social brains of babies sit primed, waiting and ready, to guide them through the social world they have just entered. Within months of birth human babies smile socially at, stare at, and study other babies. By six months they differentiate and prefer certain people in their lives, and by nine months they want to participate in activities with others. By a year they connect dominance to power and begin accurately differentiating between dominants and subordinates, and by two years status ranks emerge among playing toddlers. From the outcomes of these interactions, the earliest ranked, linear hierarchies of their young lives are established.
At playdates and on playgrounds for years to come, the ranking and sorting will continue. As toddler cartographers, they construct mental status maps featuring their peers and themselves. By four they can perceive which peers have high status, and they show a clear preference for spending time with them. They’re interested in what dominant peers are up to and spend a disproportionate amount of time watching them. Preferential interest in watching high-status individuals is a trait that continues through adult life—this trait can explain the enduring appeal of gossip tabloids and paparazzi. Adult humans and rhesus macaques have this in common: monkeys will pass up the sweet juice they love for an opportunity to watch a high-status monkey on a screen. In contrast, when shown the activities of low-status monkeys, the watchers have minimal interest. The scientists have to bribe them with extra juice just to get them to pay attention even for a short while.
As humans and animals enter wildhood, developing social competence becomes mission critical. And at no other time in an individual’s life is the SBN more active than in adolescence. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, an author and University College London neuroscientist, has used imaging and other methods to show the major influence that social peers begin to have on decision-making and risk-taking in adolescents. Compared with adults and children, she writes, “adolescents are more sociable, form more complex and hierarchical peer relationships and are more sensitive to acceptance and rejection by peers.” Laurence Steinberg, an author and Temple University psychologist, suggests that both the immature cognitive control of the adolescent brain and its increased sensitivity to reward may play roles in the power of peer influence in this age group. As he and his research colleagues reported, “Peer relations are never more salient than in adolescence.”
Walking into a cafeteria, classroom, party, or workplace, an adolescent’s Social Brain Network, which started wiring itself in infancy, is zinging with input. It’s coordinating the six involved brain regions, while gauging the social landscape. The preoptic area pulls in visuals, clocking or deploying up-down glances for maximum assessment. The midbrain contributes memories of slights and snubs; the amygdala (the brain’s fear center) flashes emotion and feelings of panic or dread. While the hypothalamus signals the release of stress hormones like cortisol or soothing hormones like oxytocin, the lateral septum promotes active stress coping behaviors. Keeping it all together is the prefrontal cortex, which decides and judges, moderates and plans the next move. It’s busy up there, with those six regions zapping messages back and forth, making sure the individual understands the hierarchy and what he or she needs to do to cope within it. And this happens every day, all day long, every time any animal with an SBN—from humans to fish—encounters any other animal with an SBN, even other family members.
Of all the processes of broader brain reorganization that happen during wildhood, the sharpening of the SBN is one of the most crucial. The experiences adolescents have while their SBNs are calibrating often stay with them for the rest of their lives. A nearly universal ability to recall intensely humiliating or exhilarating moments of adolescence points to this. And one’s perception of rank in adolescence may also be internalized. The adult brain that navigates friendships, business, politics, and social interactions is built during these sensitive years, and the adult may retain a mental map of her position in earlier adolescent social hierarchies. By late adolescence, SBN development is nearly fully complete. Like an eye in the sky, it will guide the individual through social terrain for the rest of her life.
WHY IT GETS BETTER
Dominance hierarchies are common among many groups of animals. They form and are regulated through aggression, violence, or the threat of force. Dominance hierarchies are a part of human history and modern life. They have been used to control large groups of people, like whole countries, or a single individual, like a spouse. Dictatorships, military occupations, prison societies, and physically abusive relationships are examples.
But in our species, status may rise based on an individual’s excellence at something else, something less brute than physical force. If a group values a skill, an attribute, some know-how, or another quality, the person who possesses it can gather what is called “prestige.” A person is said to have prestige if the deference shown to him or her is freely given without the threat of force. MacArthur Geniuses, Academy Award winners, YouTube stars, Malala Yousafzai, Yo-Yo Ma, J. K. Rowling, and your favorite Olympic athlete are all “prestigious.” Their high status is based on group admiration for their scientific, artistic, humanitarian, or athletic abilities and contributions. Prestige doesn’t have to involve celebrity or wealth. The marksman who consistently makes the shot; the home baker who brings the best brownies; the third-grader with the best bottle-flipping skills; the lawyer who wins a lot of cases; the fertility doctor with the highest pregnancy rate; the uncle who can always soothe the crying baby—humans value many forms of prestige.
In human hierarchies, dominance and prestige often interact, and, as has been shown time and again throughout history, both can be used for power and control. But for adolescents, understanding the difference can be revelatory, because at a key moment in adolescent development, the balance shifts. Popularity criteria for elementary, middle, and early high school hierarchies often fall outside individual control: Size. Attractiveness. Age. Athletic ability. Parental wealth. But, in mid-adolescence, a surge in competence-based hierarchies (prestige) occurs. A process called “niche picking” emerges, with students finding groups in which their particular skills and traits are valued. Their status, therefore, can rise. Competence may take the form of ability (musical, academic) or a high level of knowledge about a shared interest (politics, eccentric film, fashion, sports, video games).
Prestige hierarchies based on these competencies are often welcomed by students lacking in classic high school popularity characteristics. Moving beyond the tyranny of popularity hierarchies to find groups in which one’s strengths translate into higher status underlies the “it gets better” advice given to adolescents struggling through this period of life.
Prestige hierarchies based on valued abilities also demonstrate the power of environment to affect status. Circumstances shift and qualities once of little value rise in importance. One generation’s nerds are the next generation’s app designers and computer programmers.
Baby hyenas, like baby humans, are born with SBNs primed to navigate complex and ferocious social terrain. And that was a very good thing for Shrink. As it turned out, with the deck stacked against him in so many ways, Shrink’s greatest strength would be his social savvy.