Social Status

Status and the Brain

• Amanda V. Utevsky,
 
• Michael L. Platt mail

• Published: September 02, 2014
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001941

Social hierarchy is a fact of life for many animals. Navigating social hierarchy requires understanding one's own status relative to others and behaving accordingly, while achieving higher status may call upon cunning and strategic thinking. The neural mechanisms mediating social status have become increasingly well understood in invertebrates and model organisms like fish and mice but until recently have remained more opaque in humans and other primates. In a new study in this issue, Noonan and colleagues explore the neural correlates of social rank in macaques. Using both structural and functional brain imaging, they found neural changes associated with individual monkeys' social status, including alterations in the amygdala, hypothalamus, and brainstem—areas previously implicated in dominance-related behavior in other vertebrates. A separate but related network in the temporal and prefrontal cortex appears to mediate more cognitive aspects of strategic social behavior. These findings begin to delineate the neural circuits that enable us to navigate our own social worlds. A major remaining challenge is identifying how these networks contribute functionally to our social lives, which may open new avenues for developing innovative treatments for social disorders./.../

“Observing the habitual and almost sacred ‘pecking order’ which prevails among the hens in his poultry yard—hen A pecking hen B, but not being pecked by it, hen B pecking hen C and so forth—the politician will meditate on the Catholic hierarchy and Fascism.” —Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1929)

Pecking order or peck order is the colloquial term for a hierarchical system of social organization. It was first described by Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe in 1921 under the German terms Hackordnung or Hackliste and introduced into English in 1927.^[1]

The original use of pecking order referred to the expression of dominance in chickens. Dominance in chickens is asserted by various behaviours, including pecking, which was used by Schjelderup-Ebbe as a measure of dominance and leadership order. In his 1924 German-language article, he noted that "defense and aggression in the hen is accomplished with the beak".^[2] This emphasis on pecking led many subsequent studies on fowl behaviour to use it as a primary observation, however, it has been noted that roosters tend to leap and use their claws in conflicts.^[3]

The term dominance hierarchy is often used for this type of social organisation in other animals.

Pecking order is a basic concept in social stratification and social hierarchy that has its counterparts in other animal species, including humans, although the term "pecking order" is often used synonymously.

A Neural Circuit Covarying with Social Hierarchy in Macaques

MaryAnn P. Noonan, Jerome Sallet, Rogier B. Mars, Franz X. Neubert, Jill X. O'Reilly, Jesper L. Andersson, Anna S. Mitchell, Andrew H. Bell, Karla L. Miller, Matthew F. S. Rushworth

A neuroimaging study reveals that individual variation in brain circuits in structures below the cerebral cortex of macaques is associated with experience at different ends of the social hierarchy.