Pecking Order and Privilege

The following is an excerpt from Wildhood, a book by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Future Tense Fellow Kathryn Bowers.

It was 1901 and a six-year-old boy was playing in the backyard of the Oslo cottage that his parents had rented for the summer. The house came with a flock of chickens, and the boy, who was bright, sheltered, and intuitive, spent every day observing them. He gave each bird a name. He memorized their quirks and affiliations. Leaving the chickens at the end of the season was difficult for the sensitive boy, and he thought about them all winter.

The next spring, the boy begged his mother for a flock of his own. Perhaps she was indulging her only child or just wanted to keep him occupied during the long Norwegian summer days. Or maybe she was seizing the chance to kindle an interest in science or instill a sense of responsibility. Whatever the reason, she granted his wish. The boy passed another summer tending to a flock.

The following summer, the boy cared for more chickens, and again the next, until after a few years, he’d spent hundreds of hours observing the birds. With a precocious attention to detail, he chronicled the food they ate, and in what quantities, and meticulously logged the eggs they laid. He recorded daily weather patterns and tried to discern how it affected the hens. But what most fascinated him, what he loved above all, was mapping how the birds related to one another. On page after page, he drew complex triangles and diagrams of how the chickens rotated through their hierarchies. Day by day he noted who was sick and who was well and what that meant for group stability and group strife.

What the boy, at age ten, had noticed and would later name was the Pecking Order. It would be many years before Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, at twenty-eight, would publish his findings formally in a 1922 paper for the German psychology journal Zeitschrift für Psychologie. But “Weitere beiträge zur sozial-und individual psychologie des haushuhns” (“Contributions to the social and individual psychology of the chicken”) even today informs the basis of how we understand the ancient and powerful construction of rank and status in living creatures. The natural, in-born process that chickens use to arrange themselves in a hierarchy—observed by a ten-year-old boy—is the same one that stratifies groups of animals from elephants and raccoons to fish, reptiles, and, of course, birds. This ranking process is constantly at work in human groups too—and never more intensely than during adolescence.

Adolescence is when much of an individual’s future status is learned and solidified. How young animals are ranked and rated during their wildhoods will shape their place in the world and their sense of belonging for the rest of their lives. Some of what they’ll be judged on they can do nothing about: they’re born with—or into—it. Some of their status they can learn or cultivate, or, in rare cases, change.

All animals, including adolescents, assess one another for size, strength, and attractiveness. They evaluate age, health, and reproductive prospects. Physical abilities like swimming, flying, and fighting are contested and flaunted. On their way to joining the ranks of mature adults, they also cannily assess the power of families, friends, and rivals. They’re accepted into or spurned from the social groups that will govern their future opportunities. The pressures on an animal to perform at this time of life are immense. And with good reason, because the stakes are too.

Across species, coming of age means entering an age of assessment.

The Gravitational Pull of Status

Status. Hierarchy. Position. Standing. Class. Station. Prestige. Many just call it popularity, and some schoolkids today bluntly but accurately call it “relevance.” Whatever word you use for it, social rank—an individual’s place within a group—is a powerful shaper of personal identity.

For nonhuman animals, social rank may be less about personal identity than it is for people. But it nonetheless profoundly influences how individuals exist in their worlds. Social rank may determine whether an animal eats or starves, has offspring or remains barren, is protected from danger or cast out to the wolves. Animals will suffer pain, forgo food, give up sex, and betray others just to ensure they’re not left out or driven from a group. You might say that for social animals, status is like gravity. It’s powerful and inescapable. It’s invisible. It exerts an omnipresent force, and it molds how a creature moves through the world and behaves around others.

In nature, the lower an animal slips in group rank, the worse his or her life becomes. Higher-ranking animals have greater access to food, territory, and other resources. Failing to learn how to strategically recruit allies and navigate enemies, pay attention to peers or ignore bystanders, can cost an animal potential resources, homes, and mates.

The highest-ranking rooster in the coop, for example, has the privilege of announcing the breaking of the dawn—he crows first and until he does, his competitive subordinates must suppress the urge. Dominant female hamsters prevent the embryos of subordinates from implanting. High-ranking crayfish claim thermally perfect 23.9-degree locations, sending subordinates to waters that are too warm or too cold. The top-ranking homing pigeon claims the highest perch. And top-ranking fish swim near the front of the school, where the water is high in oxygen and low in fish feces. Low-ranking fish at the back of the school have the exact opposite experience.

It isn’t only a matter of comfort. Getting sorted to the bottom can be a life sentence—and sometimes even a death sentence. High-ranking animals enjoy privileged safety positions in their flocks and herds, so they’re less likely to be attacked, captured, and eaten by predators. High-ranking grey mullet fish occupy positions inside the school, far from the dangerous outside edges from which predators pick off their meals. Lower-ranking fish are pushed toward to the “domain of danger,” often, but not always, at the perimeter. Lower-ranking animals in general spend more time vigilant, scanning for predators. They therefore get less sleep, and the sleep they do get is poorer quality. High rank enhances an animal’s safety; low rank pushes him or her into greater risk.

Group living offers benefits to animals. With more eyes to scan the environment, safety in numbers takes predator danger off individuals. Sharing resources and information makes work more efficient and keeps them better fed. Groups allow younger members to learn and grow before taking on responsibilities. But when individuals come together, having recognizable social structures and rules to form them can help reduce conflict. Hierarchies can also keep animal groups organized and more productive.

Higher-status members of hierarchies have first dibs on food, territory, mates, and safe havens. And they will vigorously defend their position and privilege. Recognizing one’s place in the group is crucial to staying alive and brain systems alert animals to second-by-second shifts in their rising or falling social positions. Neurochemical messages nudge an animal to adjust its behavior in response to the social stew simmering around it. As far as we know, nonhuman animals experience these neurochemical “status signals” as noxious, pleasurable, or something in between. But humans register these same neurochemical status signals as emotions. In fact, our emotional lives derive from this status-detection physiology, an inherited legacy from our statusconscious animal ancestors for whom shifts in social position could mean opportunity or the end.

Animals that don’t see the full complexity of a social hierarchy may miss opportunities to better their position. But those that don’t understand their place may be attacked, injured, killed, or driven from the group. Social animals observe and evaluate every tiny detail of daily social life, scanning not only for opportunities to rise in status, but also to spot and prevent one catastrophic thing from happening: status descent.

Rapidly detecting status descent is fundamental to survival.

Primed with highly sensitive neurocircuitry that registers every compliment as acceptance and clocks every slight as rejection human adolescents pay close attention to where they fall in the hierarchy. The gravity of social status doesn’t just influence how they act; it shapes how they feel. Changes in status—whether in real life or on a screen—can induce euphoria, despair, and every feeling in between in adolescents and young adults.

According to public health sources, the twenty-first century so far has been an era of widespread loneliness and disconnection, especially for adolescents. Anxiety and depression have joined smoking and poor nutrition as urgent health concerns around the world. Parents and educators point to high-stakes testing and other academic assessments in an adolescent’s school life. Psychiatrists point to genetics, hormones, and neurochemical changes in the brain. Economists and lawmakers cite geopolitics and global recessions. Everyone blames social media. All these factors can dial up stress and mental anguish at any age. But we believe the roots of adolescent and young adult angst—from simple mood swings to more serious depressive episodes—can be found in the ancient circuitry that powers animal hierarchies.

Connecting animal social behavior to personal emotion helps us understand why finding a place in a group, especially for adolescents, feels so miserable when it goes wrong—and so jubilant when it goes well. Obsession with status, it turns out, is entirely natural. And hierarchy formation, with the status-seeking that drives it, isn’t a game you can opt out of. Given that, it’s better to learn the rules.