# Pecking Order and Flight Leadership

It was recently pointed out to me that humans are weird, compared to other social animals, in that we conflate the _pecking order _with the _group decision-making process_.

The [pecking order](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecking_order), for instance in birds, is literally the ranking of who gets to eat first when food is scarce.

We can also call it a “dominance hierarchy”, but the words “dominance” and “hierarchy” call up associations with _human _governance systems like aristocracy and monarchy, where the king or chief is _both_ the decisionmaker for the group _and _the person entitled to the most abundant resources.

In birds, it’s not like that. Being top chicken doesn’t come with the job of “leading” the other chickens anywhere; it just entitles you to eat better (or have better access to other desirable resources).  In fact, group decisionmaking (like deciding when and where to migrate) _does _occur in birds, but _not_ necessarily according to the “pecking order”.  Leadership (setting the direction of the group) and dominance (being high in the pecking order) are [completely independent](https://www.pnas.org/content/110/32/13049) in pigeons, for instance.  Pigeons have stable, transitive hierarchies of flight leadership, _and_ they have stable pecking order hierarchies, and these hierarchies do not correlate.

Logically, it isn’t necessary for the individual who _decides what others shall do_ to also be the individual who _gets the most goodies_.  They _can _be related — one of the things you can do with the power to give instructions is to instruct others to give you more goodies. But you can, at least with nonhuman animals, separate pecking-order hierarchies from decision-making hierarchies.

You can even set this up as a 2×2:

High rank in pecking order, high decision-making power: Lord

High rank in pecking order, low decision-making power: Eloi

Low rank in pecking order, high decision-making power: Morlock

Low rank in pecking order, low decision-making power: Vassal

“Eloi” and “Morlocks” are, of course, borrowed from H.G. Wells’ _The Time Machine_, which depicted a human species divided between the privileged, childlike Eloi, and the monstrous underground Morlocks, who farm them for food.  Eloi enjoy but don’t decide; Morlocks decide but don’t enjoy.

The other archetypal example of someone with low rank in the pecking order but high decision-making power is the _prophet. _Biblical prophets told people what to do — they could even give instructions to the king — but they did not enjoy positions of privilege, palaces, many wives, hereditary lands, or anything like that.  They _did _sometimes have the power to threaten or punish, which is a sort of “executive” power, but _not _the power to personally enjoy more resources than others.

In American common parlance, “leadership” or “dominance” generally means _both _being at the top of a pecking order _and _being a decision-maker for the group.  My intuition and experience says that if somebody wants to be the decision-maker for the group but _doesn’t _seem to be conspicuously seeking & enjoying goodies in zero-sum contexts — in other words, if somebody behaves like a Morlock or prophet — they will read as not behaving like a “leader”, and will fail to get a certain kind of emotional trust and buy-in and active participation from others.

My previous post on [hierarchy](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/01/23/the-relationship-between-hierarchy-and-wealth/) conflated pecking-order hierarchies with decision-making hierarchies. I said that people-telling-others-what-to-do (decision-making hierarchy) “usually goes along with” special privileges or luxuries for the superiors (pecking-order hierarchy.)  But, in fact, they _are _different things, and the distinction matters.

Most of the practical advantages of hierarchy in organizations come from decision-making hierarchy.  A tree structure, or chain of command, helps get decisions made more efficiently than many-to-many deliberative assemblies.  Many of the _inefficiencies _of hierarchy in organizations (expensive displays of deference, poor communication across power distance) are more about pecking-order hierarchy.  “So just have decision-making hierarchy without pecking-order hierarchy!” But that’s rule-by-prophets, and _in practice people seem to HATE prophets_.

The other model for leadership is the “good king”, of the kind that Siderea [writes about](https://siderea.livejournal.com/1212714.html) in this series of posts on Watership Down.  The good king is _not _just sitting on top of the pecking order enjoying luxury at the expense of his people. He listens to his people and empowers them to do their best; he shares their privations; he is genuinely committed to the common good. But he’s still a king, not a prophet. (In _Watership Down_, there actually _is _a prophet — Fiver — and Hazel, the king, is notable for _listening _to Fiver, while bad leaders ignore their prophets.)

My guess is that the “good king” _does _sit on top of a pecking-order hierarchy, but a very mild and public-spirited one.  He’s _generous_, as opposed to greedy; but generosity implies that he _could _be greedy if he wanted to. He shares credit with others who do good work, instead of hogging all the credit for himself; but _being the one to give credit _itself makes him seem central and powerful.

A “good king” seems more emotionally sustainable for humans than just having a “prophet”, but it could be that there’s a way to implement pigeon-like parallel hierarchies for resource-enjoyment and decision-making, or other structures I haven’t thought of yet.