The popular concept of the "alpha male," often associated with aggression and dominance, is a misinterpretation of scientific studies on animal behavior, particularly wolves and chimpanzees. Real animal social structures and human behavior reveal that cooperation, relationships, and prestige are more significant than brute force for influence and success.
Mind Map
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- Thanks to Good Idea Creations, home
of independent book publisher Hungry Minds
for supporting PBS.
There's a really powerful
and sometimes dangerous idea
that's taken root in pop culture.
The idea of the "alpha male." For decades, the idea
of the all powerful alpha male has dominated media.
We've been told that in animals
and in human society, the toughest,
"It is evolutional..."
the most aggressive top dog gets the power, the resources, the mates
"..biological..."
...told to stop being beta,
to be the fearless leader of the pack.
Take the red pill and you can be an alpha two.
"The only alpha they respond
to is me."
The alpha male is an idea that was born in real studies
of animal behavior and biology in the lives
and conflicts of social animals.
Few scientific concepts have been so thoroughly absorbed
by popular culture,
but this idea has been so hugely misinterpreted
and disconnected from what the science actually says,
which is part of why I, as a biologist,
and as a man, want to address it.
Because the real story of how animals wield power
and influence and
how social success actually plays out in the animal kingdom,
even in our closest relatives, can teach us a lot about how
to be better humans.
But to do that, we have to find the truth.
This is the real science of alphas.
Hey, smart people, Joe here.
Imagine a wolf pack, deadly
and powerful predators at the helm, the alpha wolf--
aggressive, teeth bared, maintaining power through force
and strength.
That's complete b#@%%#& (wolf howl)
To figure out why our idea of alphas is wrong, we have
to actually go back and understand where it comes from.
The alpha male is a surprisingly recent concept.
People only began to widely use this term around 1970,
but to understand what happened here, we have
to go back here.
The roots of the whole alpha idea start in the early 1900's
and this young Norwegian scientist,
Thorleif SchJelderup-Ebbe
that may the most Norwegian name ever. Anyway...
When he's like nine or ten years old,
he starts doing scientific observations of his pet chickens
and he realizes that there's politics happening
in a chicken coop.
He writes a paper about
how some chickens always peck certain other chickens
and certain other chickens are always just the
ones getting pecked.
There was a social order where different chickens ranked one
above the other according to status,
what scientists call a dominance hierarchy.
If you've ever heard someone use the term pecking order,
this is the origin of that term.
So you can only have a hierarchy, this ranking
of status in animals that live in groups and are social.
So it's worth having a short detour
to ask why are some animals social in the first place?
Animals can group together for a lot of different reasons
that aren't necessarily social. Zebras
and wildebeest might get together, but that's not
because they're being social with each other.
It's just that that's where the grass is.
So when does a group of animals become social?
For that to happen, the individuals in a species
who are selfish
and non-social, they have
to end up doing worse than the individuals who cooperate.
Maybe working together helps them collect more resources.
Maybe it's being better able
to defend each other against predators,
but in the end, natural selection decides that cooperating
and being social is an advantage.
The social animals reproduce more
and so that species becomes more social.
Not quite every social animal creates one of those ladders
of social status, a dominance hierarchy,
but they are surprisingly widespread from puppies
to mere cats to geese.
They're everywhere. But there was one special animal
that made the idea of top dog famous.
And so in the 1940s, this Swiss scientist named Rudolph
Schenkel wants to understand more about wolf social lives.
Like how does a wolf pack even work?
The problem is, in the 1940s wolves are basically
extinct in the wild.
Why? If you guessed because we killed them, you are right.
The only wolves that Schenkel can find are at the
zoo in Basel, Switzerland.
So he spends years watching these wolves,
and in 1947 writes this paper. On page 11, he writes
that the top male
and top female pair defend their social position
by incessant control
and repression of all types
of competition within the same sex.
And right here in this handwritten note,
he calls them "alpha animals."
This is it. This is where the concept of alpha males
and alpha females is born.
I had to say it's very cool to find like the actual paper
where someone writes something down like this
for the first time. But it wasn't until 20
or so years later that the term alpha male enters popular
culture thanks to this bestselling book,
"The Wolf" by this guy.
- My name is Dave Mech.
I've been studying wolves since 1958.
So Schenkel just figured, well, a pack is a bunch of wolves.
And when I published my 1970 book,
which ended up being a bestseller, in that book,
I cited his studies
and indicated that the top ranking member
of a pack was an alpha male.
And the top ranking female was the alpha female.
So I have been either credited
or blamed for perhaps promoting that idea.
- Now, Mitch's book contains basically everything we knew
about wolves at that time.
And because it's so popular,
it launches the alpha male concept into culture.
And that idea, the alpha male, it lands in this world
that's full of industry, corporate ladders, sports,
political drama, military conflict,
and a generation
who had very loudly been questioning all of those hierarchies.
As the alpha male concept begins to get attention,
there was just one problem.
Shenkel's whole idea of alpha wolves dominating by force
and conflict was fundamentally flawed.
- Rudolph Schenkel knew they lived in packs
but didn't know what a pack was.
So he put a bunch of wolves from various zoos
and captive situations together
and made his own artificial pack thinking it was an actual
pack like you'd find in the wild, which it wasn't.
- But around this time, wild wolf populations are
starting to recover.
So Mech continues observing wild wolves
and discovers something that completely flips the script.
- It became apparent to me
that a wolf pack was actually a family.
That idea of wolves fighting to get to the top
of a dominance hierarchy was actually not valid.
- This was a huge shift in our understanding of wolves.
A pack is not a hierarchy of dominance and conflict
and power struggles.
Wolf packs are simply families, and the alpha male
and female are just the parents.
Throwing a bunch of unrelated wolves together in a cage is
basically the wolf equivalent of prison culture.
So of course they used aggression
and violence to gain dominance.
I don't think we would look at human prisons
and say that's what we want to model human nature off of.
Right? In a natural pack,
there's no battle for the throne.
Young wolves don't challenge the parents for dominance.
They just leave when they grow up
and they go start their own packs.
Labeling parents as alphas makes no sense.
I mean, at the very least, it doesn't help us
understand wolves better.
I mean, do we call a dough an alpha deer just
because she has a fawn?
Would you call your dad or mom the alpha of the family?
- Why are we actually giving such a--quote--power
to these individuals
by calling them alphas when all they are is,
you know, the parents of the pups?
- And it turns out that the alpha male wasn't even always
the one leading the pack.
When the pups are young and being nursed by the female,
the male brings her food he attends to her.
- So during those first eight or nine weeks
or so of the pup's life,
the female is clearly dominant to that male,
- And this even extends to hunting and protection.
- When a muskox came up to a a den
of pups while I was studying them, it was really the female
that tended to be the most protective of the pups.
- Mech and other biologists tried to correct the record
with this new science, but this is a case where that book
and its outdated image of a wolf pack had already morphed
into a cultural meme that was beyond their control.
In 1982,
Dutch primatologist Frans De Waal published the book
Chimpanzee Politics.
De Waal's idea was that if we wanted
to look at other animals to learn about dominance
and hierarchies and maybe how they apply to humans,
we should look at our closest relative chimpanzee politics
explored how chimpanzee's angle for power
and influence became an instant classic, pouring gas on the
fire of the popular idea of the alpha male. Former speaker
of the US House, Newt Gingrich even handed out copies
