ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Aggression heuristics underlie animal dominance hierarchies and provide evidence of group-level social information.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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37 citing papers in PubMed, 5 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Monk parakeets 'test the waters' when forming new relationships.Biology letters · 2025Article
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- Parrot politics: social decision-making in wild parrots relies on both individual recognition and intrinsic markers.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Royal Jelly Enhances the Social Status of Submissive Rats by Restoring Balance to the Disturbed Gut-Brain Communication.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Social dominance influences individual susceptibility to an evolutionary trap in mosquitofish.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2025Article
- How can we apply decision-making theories to wild animal behavior? Predictions arising from dual process theory and Bayesian decision theory.American journal of primatology · 2025Review
- Species-specific behavioural responses to environmental variation as a potential species coexistence mechanism in ants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Effects of Personality and Behavioral Syndromes on Competition for Social Hierarchical Status in AnemonefishAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Evidence for vocal signatures and voice-prints in a wild parrot.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Demographic turnover can be a leading driver of hierarchy dynamics, and social inheritance modifies its effects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Turning tables: food availability shapes dynamic aggressive behaviour among asynchronously hatching siblings in red kitesRoyal Society open science · 2023Article
- Individual identity information persists in learned calls of introduced parrot populations.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Bullying as an advertisement of social dominance in common waxbills.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Mixed-species groups and the question of dominance in the social ecosystem.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Review of the Effects of Enclosure Complexity and Design on the Behaviour and Physiology of Zoo Animals.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- Social Hierarchy Dictates Intestinal Radiation Injury in a Gut Microbiota-Dependent Manner.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- The ecology of wealth inequality in animal societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Members of a social species need to make appropriate decisions about who, how, and when to interact with others in their group. However, it has been difficult for researchers to detect the inputs to these decisions and, in particular, how much information individuals actually have about their social context. We present a method that can serve as a social assay to quantify how patterns of aggression depend upon information about the ranks of individuals within social dominance hierarchies. Applied to existing data on aggression in 172 social groups across 85 species in 23 orders, it reveals three main patterns of rank-dependent social dominance: the downward heuristic (aggress uniformly against lower-ranked opponents), close competitors (aggress against opponents ranked slightly below self), and bullying (aggress against opponents ranked much lower than self). The majority of the groups (133 groups, 77%) follow a downward heuristic, but a significant minority (38 groups, 22%) show more complex social dominance patterns (close competitors or bullying) consistent with higher levels of social information use. These patterns are not phylogenetically constrained and different groups within the same species can use different patterns, suggesting that heuristic use may depend on context and the structuring of aggression by social information should not be considered a fixed characteristic of a species. Our approach provides opportunities to study the use of social information within and across species and the evolution of social complexity and cognition.
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