Quite vividly explained and also very interesting from a psychological perspective.
Maybe it is not only aggressive behaviour that constitutes internal order but also cohesion. So you have a two-factor dynamic, that is ranging around a medium state, witch can change over time?
Ivan, this is an exquisite article with important findings, brilliant insights and epistemic humility. I sense there’s a book that wants to emerge from your life’s work….
Two observations / hypotheses…
1) It seems as though linearity is a Nash Equilibrium of sorts, albeit a weak one. My hypothesis as to why is efficiency / conservation of energy: as someone in the group, if I have to spend energy/thought determining each interaction who is the leader, it’s exhausting and takes away focus from more important activities. But if I can just “set and forget”, that works, because any chicken I encounter I know they are either my leader or they follow my lead. Simple and effective heuristic. Emergent behavior is a linear ordering.
2) The less permanent my memory is the more dynamic the rearrangements into different (mostly) linear configurations over the course of the whole movie. So Jordan Peterson might be right in that us humans with great long-term memory can get stuck in seemingly permanent pecking orders. (Test this with elephants or other beings with good memories?) The other element of humans is we have a robust social self-identity complex (aka ego/persona in the technical sense). This may create a “lock-in” or self-reinforcing feedback loop in which we look for evidence (confirmation bias) that we are in our “rightful place” in the social order and we ignore or resist the idea that we could change (after all change is scary and computationally expensive).
Peterson may also be oversimplifying the human case because we also have great cognitive complexity and we can reflect, reason and even change our self-identity. Individuals who understand and practice this in society may be the ones who defy the laws of social physics and become free of the linearity and pecking orders entirely.
Excellent post, thank you. I appreciate your explanation of dominance hierarchies in a way that's more accessible to laypeople than academic papers. The illustrations are also helpful.
When you talk about the attribute theory, one thing I think about is what you might call "the philosophy of attributes". I ask myself, "what is an attribute?" Simple attributes might be physical weight or height, which are easy for anyone to understand. More complex attributes can be defined, and they could be any mixture of results of various tests taken on an individual. But eventually, I think that a good definition for attribute is "any test that we can run on an individual that yields a real number."
Since one of the main qualities of real numbers is that they form a strict total order, the attempt to explain linear dominance hierarchies by means of attributes becomes a tautological argument.
Quite vividly explained and also very interesting from a psychological perspective.
Maybe it is not only aggressive behaviour that constitutes internal order but also cohesion. So you have a two-factor dynamic, that is ranging around a medium state, witch can change over time?
So well-written. Challenging and intriguing ideas proposed. Shows the imprecision of much current research. Bravo!
Ivan, this is an exquisite article with important findings, brilliant insights and epistemic humility. I sense there’s a book that wants to emerge from your life’s work….
Two observations / hypotheses…
1) It seems as though linearity is a Nash Equilibrium of sorts, albeit a weak one. My hypothesis as to why is efficiency / conservation of energy: as someone in the group, if I have to spend energy/thought determining each interaction who is the leader, it’s exhausting and takes away focus from more important activities. But if I can just “set and forget”, that works, because any chicken I encounter I know they are either my leader or they follow my lead. Simple and effective heuristic. Emergent behavior is a linear ordering.
2) The less permanent my memory is the more dynamic the rearrangements into different (mostly) linear configurations over the course of the whole movie. So Jordan Peterson might be right in that us humans with great long-term memory can get stuck in seemingly permanent pecking orders. (Test this with elephants or other beings with good memories?) The other element of humans is we have a robust social self-identity complex (aka ego/persona in the technical sense). This may create a “lock-in” or self-reinforcing feedback loop in which we look for evidence (confirmation bias) that we are in our “rightful place” in the social order and we ignore or resist the idea that we could change (after all change is scary and computationally expensive).
Peterson may also be oversimplifying the human case because we also have great cognitive complexity and we can reflect, reason and even change our self-identity. Individuals who understand and practice this in society may be the ones who defy the laws of social physics and become free of the linearity and pecking orders entirely.
Excellent post, thank you. I appreciate your explanation of dominance hierarchies in a way that's more accessible to laypeople than academic papers. The illustrations are also helpful.
When you talk about the attribute theory, one thing I think about is what you might call "the philosophy of attributes". I ask myself, "what is an attribute?" Simple attributes might be physical weight or height, which are easy for anyone to understand. More complex attributes can be defined, and they could be any mixture of results of various tests taken on an individual. But eventually, I think that a good definition for attribute is "any test that we can run on an individual that yields a real number."
Since one of the main qualities of real numbers is that they form a strict total order, the attempt to explain linear dominance hierarchies by means of attributes becomes a tautological argument.