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.
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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
- I think what interests me most about chimpanzees is their
similarity to humans.
They are one of our closest living relatives.
Chimpanzees and bonobos are the two animals
that are more similar to humans than any other species.
- How similar? Well, chimps
and their cousins Bonobos, they share about 98.7%
of their DNA with humans.
And they share 99.6% of their DNA with each other.
- A lot of the reason that chimpanzees are useful
for studying human behavior is that we are apes.
- Like all other primates, chimpanzees live in groups
with deep social connections.
A chimp community can range from just around a dozen
to over a hundred individuals.
Male chimps will stay in a group their whole life.
They stay close to mom until they're about 10.
Then they join the older males and do guy stuff.
Female chimps typically leave the group they grew up with.
When they're teenagers, they join another group
and spend the rest of their life there.
Now wolf packs, remember, are really just families, but...
- So with chimpanzees, they seem
to have a really clear dominant hierarchy, especially
among the adult males
and all the adult male chimpanzees in a community have a
sense of where they fall relative to other adult males.
- This dominance sort of takes shape through charging,
chasing, slapping each other, kind of like a game
of chimpanzee playground tag.
- It's usually the threat of force.
And then they'll sort of indicate submission
or deference through the pant grunt:
this grunting panting noise.
- And usually one male chimpanzee holds the highest rank, the
alpha male.
He never makes a submission grunt to any other male.
But what is all this quest for dominance?
Even for unsurprisingly, a lot
of it is about romance
or in scientist speak.
- The higher ranking adult male chimpanzees do tend
to mate more with females
and to reproduce more with females.
- That's not the only hierarchy in chimp societies, right?
There may be completely different hierarchies for who gets
to sleep where or who gets access to food.
There's not just one top male in every situation.
Being an alpha male, if you're an ape, which we are,
is not a personality trait.
Who has power, who has influence, and who ranks where?
It depends on the situation that you're talking about
and it is rarely just about physical strength or control.
- If you watch like YouTube videos or the way kids
and are talking about in high school or college,
"The strength is even a way to try and not be weak."
"...cause men are the backbone of the slave force."
"We've evolved for the hierarchy."
- That's not how it's meant to be used in animal behavior.
It's not a personality trait, it's a relationship
and it doesn't necessarily relate
to other behaviors like leadership. In chimpanzees,
the alpha is not the leader.
He's just the highest ranking male.
You have other chimps who might be leaders, for example,
and protecting the group
and going on these territorial excursions.
And I think that primatologists sort
of got focused on dominance
because it was something
that we could measure pretty easily.
- One of the remarkable things about chimpanzees is
that they formed these really strong
and enduring social bonds with other chimps.
- If I were to think about what makes a successful male
chimpanzee, it wouldn't be "are you the alpha?"
And it wouldn't necessarily be, "are you even high ranking?"
Although that might help.
It would really be about "do you have a friend?"
"Are you connected to other individuals in the community?"
If a female doesn't leave at adolescence
and she stays in her community,
sometimes she'll stay in sort of the neighborhood
that she grew up in and she can develop a really strong
relationship with her mother throughout adulthood.
These are like the strongest
relationships you see in chimpanzees.
They're often inseparable, really amazing to watch.
The second strongest relationship in adult chimpanzees is
between adult male chimpanzees
where they have these friendly cooperative relationships.
They spend time traveling together, sitting together,
grooming with each other, and sometimes they last over five
or even over 10 years.
If you have a friendship that lasts five
or 10 years, I mean that's longer than many
marriages in humans.
- Scientists think these friendships
between male chimpanzees most closely resemble the pair
bonds that we see between human mates.
- Like a lot of primatologists notice, okay,
they study these strong same-sex relationships
between male primates.
You see this in other, some other species too,
and sometimes they call these "bromances."
But I think they're "romances."
Just call 'em what they are. They're romances.
- Becoming an alpha male chimpanzee is not only about being
strong and powerful.
The most influential males also have to be generous.
They show empathy, they resolve conflict, they bring food
to other chimpanzees.
They'll play with the babies, they'll engage
with the females.
Male chimpanzees spend a lot of time building goodwill
and favor with a lot of other chimps when they're trying
to move up the hierarchy.
And we can't overlook bonobos. They're just
as closely related to us as chimps are.
In bonobo societies, the dominant individual is
often a female.
And among bonobos, conflict isn't resolved
with strength or aggression.
They resolve conflict with sex.
So yes, tons
of animals construct these social ranking systems,
but this simplistic view of dominance by aggression
and strength and control is pulled from bad science
and our closest relatives prove that is not the only way
or even the best way to gain influence and power.
Ultimately, the very scientist to introduce the idea
of the alpha male being this king of aggression
and dominance, being the top wolf, has had to fight
for decades to get the actual truth out there.
- Not just interesting but but frustrating.
I keep having to answer questions about things
that I published in 1970, which are not right,
you know. I think mainly as a result of the publicity
that was coming out about this whole alpha business.
And that's when I thought, I really should try
to get this thing out of print.
- Today,
the very book that birthed the idea
of the alpha male in popular culture is no longer being
printed because the author had enough humility to know
that the science had to be corrected.
- I think that it's very important for any scientist
to reflect on their own work
and we correct ourselves. If we don't, someone else does.
- I mean, one interesting thing about humans, we love
to look at other animals to sort of understand our behavior,
but we can also study humans to understand humans.
And people who study humans across cultures,
and in a range of cultures, identify that, okay,
humans aren't really doing, like, the dominance
that we think about when we think about chimpanzee males and
and threats of aggression.
Humans don't really do that.
- For humans.
What seems to matter more than dominance is this idea
of prestige.
- It's not your ability to threaten others
and intimidate others.
That doesn't actually get you power In a lot
of human cultures, what gets you power is knowledge,
expertise, and actually your ability to share that.
- It's really worth asking why this misunderstanding about
alpha males is so popular in so many aspects of our society.
What unmet need is this misinformed idea filling?
- The conversation about the alpha I think is sort
of a facade for a conversation about our relationships more
broadly. And I think in primatology, in animal behavior
and in popular culture in high schools and on YouTube
and stuff, it's all sort of circling around the importance
of relationships--the importance of feeling
a sense of belonging.
- The idea of the alpha male in human society must be
considered very carefully.
- What seems undeniable today is that our needs
as hyper-social primates who evolve around connection
and bonding with others... those needs are not being met.
- It's all about finding ways we can connect more.
I think that's a really serious...
it's a really pressing concern. How do we connect?
- Really what this makes me think about is what lessons should
and shouldn't we take from the animal kingdom?
I mean, it would be a little weird if we were modeling human
societies and behaviors
and norms off of lobsters or whatever.
I mean, we last shared a common ancestor
with them like 350 million years ago.
But we are extremely closely related to chimpanzees.
It makes more sense that we would look
to our closest relatives to find a reflection of ourselves.
And when we do, we should try to be honest
and accurate with what we see.
But I think we should be really cautious about taking any
lessons or models for behavior from other animals.
"Being a man acting like an ape..."
- Because every other species on earth took its own
evolutionary journey to get where it is and how it is.
And our path is special and unique to us,
because yes, the reality is: chimpanzee alpha males are much
more about cooperation
and empathy compared to most people's concept of alpha male.
But chimps also do a lot of things
that we definitely don't want to model.
Like, they regularly eat the flesh of other chimpanzees
after battle, even young ones.
That is not a behavior I think we should adopt.
There is absolutely a biological basis
to why we act the way we act.
So you cannot understand humans if you don't pay attention
to biology. And chimps are the closest other species we have
to study. But so are Bonobos,
and they have basically invented a female-led society based
on love and pleasure.
I think the most important point
to remember in this whole "alpha" conversation is this:
We have this very unique
and special ability to think about,
and choose, what we want to be and how we want to behave.
I'm not sure a wolf could say that...
or even a chimpanzee could for that matter.
This is an immense privilege that our species has,
and we should choose wisely. Not just what is best
for ourselves, but maybe, just maybe what is also best
for the rest of our social species at the same time.
Stay curious.
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It's what an alpha would do.
In 1982, Dutch Primatologist,
Franz Dal published the book Chimpanzee Pop.. Pop.. Poptics?
Poptics... Sandal? Sandel? Sandal?
I need my books!
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