Social hierarchies are widespread in human and animal societies, and an individual’s position in its hierarchy affects both its access to resources and its fitness. Hierarchies are traditionally thought of in terms of variation in individual ability to win fights, but many are structured around arbitrary conventions like nepotistic inheritance rather than such traits as physical strength or weapon size. These convention-based societies are perplexing because position in the hierarchy appears to be gained irrespective of individual physical ability, yet social status strongly affects access to resources and fitness. It remains unclear why individuals abide by seemingly arbitrary conventions regarding social status when they stand to benefit by ignoring these conventions and competing for top positions or access to resources. Using data from wild spotted hyenas collected over 27 y and five generations, we show that individuals who repeatedly form coalitions with their top allies are likely to improve their position in the hierarchy, suggesting that social alliances facilitate revolutionary social change. Using lifetime reproductive success as a fitness measure, we go on to demonstrate that these status changes can have major fitness consequences. Finally, we show that the consequences of these changes may become even more dramatic over multiple generations, as small differences in social rank become amplified over time. This work represents a first step in reconciling the advantages of high status with the appearance of “arbitrary” conventions that structure inequality in animal and human societies.
Aggression is ubiquitous among animals, and contest outcomes in many gregarious species yield societies structured by dominance hierarchies. Recent results from a variety of disciplines have laid the groundwork for an integrative view of aggression and dominance, ranging from their physiological underpinnings to their evolutionary histories. Here we use Tinbergen's four levels of behavioral analysis to summarize our current understanding of aggressive behavior and dominance relationships. First, we discuss the role of epigenetic effects in the ontogenetic emergence of aggressive and rank-related phenotypes, and summarize how these phenotypes are mediated by endocrine and nervous system activity. We briefly review recent work on the functions of aggression and dominance hierarchies in animal societies, and then consider their phylogenetic history. Finally, we review methodological encumbrances to the study of dominance, and consider the unique evolution of aggression and dominance relationships in humans. Main text (2000-2500 words) right now we're at 3006, including refs & boxes Only 2295 in main text (without boxes)
In this article, we investigate how context influences color preferences by comparing preferences for “contextless” colored squares with preferences for colors of a variety of objects (e.g., walls, couches, and T‐shirts). In experiment 1, we find that hue preferences for contextless squares generalize relatively well to hue preferences for imagined objects, with the substantial differences being in the saturation and lightness dimensions. In experiments 2 and 3, we find that object color preferences are relatively invariant when the objects are (a) imagined to be the color that is presented as a small square, (b) depicted as colored images of objects, and (c) viewed as actual physical objects. In experiment 4, we investigate the possibility that object color preferences are related to the degree to which colors help objects fulfill particular functions or outcomes. We also discuss relations between our results and previous theories of color preference. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 38, 393–411, 2013
1. Social inequality is a consistent feature of animal societies, often manifesting as dominance hierarchies, in which each individual is characterized by a dominance rank denoting its place in the network of competitive relationships among group members. Most studies treat dominance hierarchies as static entities despite their true longitudinal, and sometimes highly dynamic, nature.2. To guide study of the dynamics of dominance, we propose the concept of a longitudinal hierarchy: the characterization of a single, latent hierarchy and its dynamics over time. Longitudinal hierarchies describe the hierarchy position (r) and dynamics (∆) associated with each individual as a property of its interaction data, the periods into which these data are divided based on a period delineation rule (p) and the method chosen to infer the hierarchy. Hierarchy dynamics result from both active (∆a) and passive (∆p) processes. Methods that infer longitudinal hierarchies should optimize accuracy of rank dynamics as well as of the rank orders themselves, but no studies have yet evaluated the accuracy with which different methods infer hierarchy dynamics.3. We modify three popular ranking approaches to make them better suited for inferring longitudinal hierarchies. Our three "informed" methods assign ranks that are informed by data from the prior period rather than calculating ranks de novo in each observation period and use prior knowledge of dominance correlates to inform placement of new individuals in the hierarchy. These methods are provided in an R package. 4. Using both a simulated dataset and a long-term empirical dataset from a species with two distinct sex-based dominance structures, we compare the performance of these methods and their unmodified counterparts. We show that choice of method has dramatic impacts on inference of hierarchy dynamics via differences in estimates of ∆a. Methods that calculate ranks de novo in each period overestimate hierarchy dynamics, but incorporation of prior information leads to more accurately inferred ∆a. Of the modified methods, Informed MatReorder infers the most conservative estimates of hierarchy dynamics and Informed Elo infers the most dynamic hierarchies. 5. This work provides crucially needed conceptual framing and methodological validation for studying social dominance and its dynamics.
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