De mythe van de alfaman
Authors:   , Hattinga van 't Sant Eliane Adorée 
Published: December 2023

The idea that dominance hierarchies structure and rule the social lives of animals is currently a widespread concept/theorem in the behavioural sciences. The terms ‘alpha male’, ‘pack leader’, ‘top dog’, ‘pecking order’ and ‘fights for dominance’ recur endlessly to describe animal behaviour. The chimpanzee and the wolf in particular figure as the role models for the ideal human alpha male and leader of the pack; in the public domain mostly cheered upon for their vigorous masculinity, courage, loyalty, confidence, survival abilities and leadership qualities.

This PhD thesis aims at answering three questions from a historical and contextual point of view. Firstly, why and secondly how has the concept of dominance become dominant in a plethora of behavioural sciences. And thirdly, why is it still going so strong?

It is shown that the concept of dominance came into being in the 1920s. It was created, not by nature or evolution as is widely believed nowadays, but by eugenecists and scientists looking for answers to social – human – problems. The concept was a human invention, a postulate, used to prove the god-given superiority of the upperclass white elite in order to legitimize their power as rulers over other people of ‘lower classes’ or ‘inferior races’. Projected on animal behavior, the dominance hierarchy was proved to exist in animals with the help of experiments on social animals, kept in captivity under very unnatural circumstances, as it was widely believed that the animal’s instinctive behaviour was no different in captivity from their natural behaviour. In the late 1930s and the 1940s the concept was transformed into a naturally evolved principle, a law of nature, and used to explain animal and human behaviour.
In the 1960s more and more ecologists and ethologists – well schooled academics – took to the field to study animals and their intraction with their environment, armed with scientific objectivistic ideals of the ‘modern synthesis’ movement. As a consequence, mental distance was created, still more enlarged by the taboo on anthropomorphization. Spurning the more unmethodic and often anthropomorphic descriptions of the naturalists before them as being unscientific, the ethologists, ecologists and paleontologists looked at scientific principles for guidance, such as the concept of dominance. No longer confined to the laboratory, it now became a confirmed part of the natural world. Standing alone, believed to be firmly rooted in evolution, it held a firm appeal to scientists and the public no longer familiar with its origins and its historical context.
However, the concept of the linear dominance hierarchy with an alpha at the top does not meet the objectivistic ideals and standards of the scientists who use or defend it. In fact, these ideals, together with the taboo on antropomorphic descriptions, came to conceal that it was a the invention of a scientific elite that often adhered eugenics. Therefore, the conclusion must be that there is no reason to hold on to the concept, as it is unfounded and includes a threat to human and animal welfare.