Be Smart

- There's a really powerful and sometimes dangerous idea that's taken root in pop culture, the idea of the alpha male.

For decades, the idea of the all-powerful alpha male has dominated media.

We've been told that in animals and in human society the toughest.

- It is evolutional.

- The most aggressive top dog gets the power, the resources, the mate.

- Biological.

- Told to stop being beta, to be the fearless leader of the pack.

Take the red pill and you can be an alpha too.

- The only alpha they respond to is me.

- The alpha male is an idea that was born in real studies of animal behavior and biology in the lives and conflicts of social animals.

Few scientific concepts have been so thoroughly absorbed by popular culture, but this idea has been so hugely misinterpreted and disconnected from what the science actually says, which is part of why I, as a biologist and as a man, want to address it, because the real story of how animals wield power and influence and how social success actually, plays out in the animal kingdom, even in our closest relatives, can teach us a lot about how to be better humans, but to do that, we have to find the truth.

This is the real science of alphas.

(mysterious music) Hey, smart people, Joe here.

Imagine a wolf pack, deadly and powerful predators, at the helm the alpha wolf.

Aggressive, teeth bared, maintaining power through force and strength.

That's complete.

(wolf howling) To figure out why our idea of alphas is wrong, we have to actually go back and understand where it comes from.

The alpha male is a surprisingly recent concept.

People only begin to widely use this term around 1970, but to understand what happened here we have to go back here.

The roots of the whole alpha idea start in the early 1900s and this young Norwegian scientist, Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe.

That might be the most Norwegian name ever.

Anyway, when he's like nine or 10 years old, he starts doing scientific observations of his pet chickens and he realizes that there's politics happening in a chicken coop.

He writes a paper about how some chickens always peck certain other chickens and certain other chickens are always just the ones getting pecked.

There was a social order where different chickens ranked one above the other according to status, what scientists call a dominance hierarchy.

If you've ever heard someone use the term pecking order, this is the origin of that term.

So, you can only have a hierarchy, this ranking of status, in animals that live in groups and are social.

So, it's worth having a short detour to ask, why are some animals social in the first place?

Animals could group together for a lot of different reasons that aren't necessarily social.

Zebras and wildebeest might get together, but that's not because they're being social with each other it's just that that's where the grass is.

So, when does a group of animals become social?

For that to happen, the individuals in a species who are selfish and non-social they have to end up doing worse than the individuals who cooperate.

You know, maybe working together helps 'em collect more resources.

Maybe it's being better able to defend each other against predators, but in the end, natural selection decides that cooperating and being social is an advantage.

The social animals reproduce more, and so, that species becomes more social.

Not quite every social animal creates one of those ladders of social status, a dominance hierarchy, but they are surprisingly widespread from puppies to meerkats to geese.

They're everywhere.

But there was one special animal that made the idea of top dog famous.

And so in the 1940s, this Swiss scientist named Rudolph Schenkel wants to understand more about wolf social lives, like how does a wolf pack even work?

The problem is, in the 1940s, wolves are basically, extinct in the wild.

Why?

If you guessed, because we killed them, you are right.

The only wolves that Schenkel can find are at the zoo in Basel, Switzerland.

So, he spends years watching these wolves, and in 1947 writes this paper.

On page 11, he writes that the top male and top female pair defend their social position by incessant control and repression of all types of competition within the same sex.

And right here in this handwritten note, he calls them alpha animals.

This is it.

This is where the concept of alpha males and alpha females is born.

I had to say it's very cool to find like the actual paper where someone writes something down like this for the first time, but it wasn't until 20 or so years later that the term alpha male enters popular culture.

Thanks to this bestselling book "The Wolf" by this guy.

- My name is Dave Mech.

I've been studying wolves since 1958.

So, Schenkel just figured, well, a pack is a bunch of wolves.

And when I published my 1970 book, which ended up being a bestseller, in that book, I cited his studies and indicated that the top-ranking member of a pack was an alpha male, and the top-ranking female was the alpha female.

So, I have been either credited or blamed for perhaps promoting that idea.

- Now, Mech's book contains basically, everything we knew about wolves at that time.

And because it's so popular, it launches the alpha male concept into culture.

And that idea, the alpha male, it lands in this world that's full of industry and corporate ladders, sports, political drama, military conflict, and a generation who had very loudly been questioning all of those hierarchies.

As the alpha male concept begins to get attention, there was just one problem.

Schenkel's whole idea of alpha wolves dominating by force and conflict was fundamentally flawed.

- Rudolph Schenkel knew they lived in packs, but didn't know what a pack was, so he put a bunch of wolves various zoos in captive situations together and made his own artificial pack.

Thinking it was an actual pack like you'd find in the wild, which it wasn't.

- But around this time, wild wolf populations are starting to recover.

So, Mech continues observing wild wolves.

Discovers something that completely flips the script.

- It became apparent to me that a wolf pack was actually, a family.

That idea of wolves fighting to get to the top of a dominance hierarchy was actually, not valid.

- This was a huge shift in our understanding of wolves.

A pack is not a hierarchy of dominance and conflict and power struggles.

Wolf packs are simply families.

- [Vin] I love family.

- And the alpha male and female are just the parents.

Throwing a bunch of unrelated wolves together in a cage, is basically, the wolf equivalent of prison culture.

So, of course, they used aggression and violence to gain dominance.

I don't think we would look at human prisons and say, "That's what we wanna model human nature off of," right?

In a natural pack, there's no battle for the throne.

Young wolves don't challenge the parents for dominance.

They just leave when they grow up and they go start their own packs.

Labeling parents as alphas makes no sense.

I mean, at the very least, it doesn't help us understand wolves better.

I mean, do we call a dough an alpha deer just because she has a fawn?

Would you call your dad or mom the alpha of the family?

- Why are we actually, giving such a quote power to these individuals by calling them alphas when all they are is, you know, parents of the pups?

- And it turns out that the alpha male wasn't even always the one leading the pack.

When the pups are young and being nursed by the female, the male brings her food, he attends to her.

- [Mech] So, during those first eight or nine weeks or so of the pup's life, the female is clearly dominant to that male.

- And this even extends to hunting and protection.

- [Mech] When a muskox came up to a den of pups, while I was studying them, it was really the female that tended to be the most protective of the pups.

- Mech and other biologists tried to correct the record with this new science, but this is a case where that book and its outdated image of a wolf pack had already morphed into a cultural meme that was beyond their control.

In 1982, Dutch primatologist Frans De Waal published the book "Chimpanzee Politics".

De Waal's idea was that, if we wanted to look at other animals to learn about dominance and hierarchies and maybe how they apply to humans, we should look at our closest relative.

"Chimpanzee Politics" explored how chimpanzees angle for power and influence became an instant classic.

Pouring gas on the fire of the popular idea of the alpha male.

Former Speaker of the US House, Newt Gingrich, even handed out copies of it in Congress.

That explains a lot.

From that point to today, when people talk about an alpha male, they usually mean a kind of bully.

Someone who's loud, aggressive, always dominating, constantly proving he's the boss, but this completely gets the science wrong again.

- It is, it's a complete mess sort of.

If you look at YouTube or whatever, there isn't a lot of good information out there about dominance or alpha males.

Almost none of that material is grounded in our understanding based in animal behavior.

- [Joe] Aaron studies the social lives and emotions of chimpanzees and other apes.

- I think what interests me most about chimpanzees is there similarity to humans.

They are one of our closest living relatives.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are the two animals that are more similar to humans than any other species.

- [Joe] How similar?

Well, chimps and their cousins, bonobos, they share about 98.7% of their DNA with humans and they share 99.6% of their DNA with each other.

- A lot of the reason that chimpanzees are useful for studying human behavior is that we are apes.

- Like all other primates, chimpanzees live in groups with deep social connections.

A chimp community can range from just around a dozen to over 100 individuals.

Male chimps will stay in a group their whole life.

They stay close to mom until they're about 10.

Then they join the older males and do guy stuff.

Female chimps typically, leave the group they grew up with when they're teenagers.

They join another group and spend the rest of their life there.

Now, wolf packs remember, are really just families, but.

- So with chimpanzees, they seem to have a really clear dominant hierarchy, especially among the adult males and all the adult male chimpanzees in a community have a sense of where they fall relative to other adult males.

- This dominance sort of takes shape through charging, chasing, slapping each other, kind of like a game of chimpanzee playground tag.

- It's usually, the threat of force.

And then they'll sort of indicate to mission or deference through the pant grunt, this grunting, panting noise.

(chimp grunting) - And usually, one male chimpanzee holds the highest rank, the alpha male.

He never makes a submission grunt to any other male.

But what is all this quest for dominance even for?

Unsurprisingly, a lot of it is about romance, or in scientists speak.

- [Aaron] The higher ranking adult male chimpanzees do tend to mate more with females and to reproduce more with females.

- But that's not the only hierarchy in chimp societies, right?

There may be completely different hierarchies for who gets to sleep where or who gets access to food.

There's not just one top male in every situation.

Being an alpha male, if you're an ape, which we are, is not a personality trait.

Who has power, who has influence, and who ranks where?

It depends on the situation that you're talking about and it is rarely just about physical strength or control.

- If you watch like YouTube videos or the way kids, and I'm talking about in high school or college.

- The strength is even a way to try and not be weak.

- 'Cause men are the backbone of the slave force.

- We've evolved for the hierarchy.

- That's not how it's meant to be used in animal behavior.

It's not a personality trait, it's a relationship.

And it doesn't necessarily relate to other behaviors like leadership.

In chimpanzees, the alpha is not the leader.

He's just the highest ranking male.

You have other chimps who might be leaders, for example, and protecting the group and going on these territorial excursions.

And I think that primatologists sort of got focused on dominance, because it was something that we could measure pretty easily.

- One of the remarkable things about chimpanzees is that they form these really strong and enduring social bonds with other chimps.

- If I were to think about what makes a successful male chimpanzee it wouldn't be, are you the alpha?

And it wouldn't necessarily be, are you even high ranking, although that might help.

It would really be about, do you have a friend?

Are you connected to other individuals in the community?

If a female doesn't leave at adolescence and she stays in her community, sometimes she'll stay in sort of the neighborhood that she grew up in and she can develop a really strong relationship with her mother throughout adulthood.

These are like the strongest relationships you see in chimpanzees.

They're often inseparable, really amazing to watch.

The second strongest relationship in adult chimpanzees is between adult male chimpanzees where they have these friendly cooperative relationships.

They spend time traveling together, sitting together, grooming with each other, and sometimes they last over five or even over 10 years.

If you have a friendship that lasts five or 10 years, I mean, that's longer than many marriages in humans.

- Scientists think these friendships between male chimpanzees most closely resemble the pair bonds that we see between human mates.

- It's like a lot of primatologists notice, okay, they study these strong same-sex relationships between male primates.

You see this in some other species too, and sometimes they call these bromances, but I think they're romances.

They're call 'em what they are, they're romances.

- Becoming an alpha male Chimpanzee is not only about being strong and powerful.

The most influential males also have to be generous.

They show empathy, they resolve conflict, they bring food to other chimpanzees, they'll play with the babies, they'll engage with the females.

Male chimpanzees spend a lot of time building goodwill and favor with a lot of other chimps when they're trying to move up the hierarchy.

And we can't overlook bonobos, they're just as closely related to us as chimps are.

In bonobo societies, the dominant individual's often a female, and among bonobos, conflict isn't resolved with strength or aggression.

They resolve conflict with sex.

(romantic music) So yes, tons of animals construct these social ranking systems, but this simplistic view of dominance by aggression and strength and control is pulled from bad science and our closest relatives prove that is not the only way or even the best way to gain influence and power.

Ultimately, the very scientist who introduce the idea of the alpha male being this king of aggression and dominance, being the top wolf, has had to fight for decades to get the actual truth out there.

- It not just interesting, but frustrating.

I keep having to answer questions about things that I published in 1970, which are not right, you know?

I think mainly, as a result of the publicity that was coming out about this whole alpha business, and that's when I thought I really should try to get this thing out of print.

- Today, the very book that birthed the idea of the alpha male in popular culture is no longer being printed, because the author had enough humility to know that the science had to be corrected.

- I think that it's very important for any scientist to reflect on their own work and we correct ourselves.

If we don't, someone else does.

- I mean, one interesting thing about humans, we love to look at other animals to sort of understand our behavior, but we can also study humans to understand humans.

And people who study humans across cultures and in a range of cultures identify that, okay, humans aren't really doing like the dominance that we think about when we think about chimpanzee males and threats of aggression.

Humans don't really do that.

- For humans, what seems to matter more than dominance is this idea of prestige.

- It's not your ability to threaten others and intimidate others.

That doesn't actually get you power in a lot of human cultures.

What gets you power is knowledge, expertise, and actually, your ability to share that.

- It's really worth asking, why this misunderstanding about alpha males is so popular in so many aspects of our society?

What unmet need is this misinformed idea filling?

- The conversation about the alpha I think is sort of a facade for a conversation about our relationships more broadly, and I think in primatology in animal behavior and in popular culture, in high schools and on YouTube and stuff, it's all sort of circling around the importance of relationships, the importance of feeling a sense of belonging.

- The idea of the alpha male in human society must be considered very carefully.

- What seems undeniable today is that our needs as hyper social primates who evolved around connection and bonding with others, those needs are not being met.

- It's all about finding ways we can connect more.

I think that's a really serious, it's a really pressing concern.

How do we connect?

- Really, what this makes me think about is what lessons should and shouldn't we take from the animal kingdom?

I mean, it would be a little weird, if we were modeling human societies and behaviors and norms off of lobsters or whatever.

I mean, we last shared a common ancestor with them like 350 million years ago, but we are extremely closely related to chimpanzees.

It makes more sense that we would look to our closest relatives to find a reflection of ourselves, and when we do, we should try to be honest and accurate with what we see.

But I think we should be really cautious about taking any lessons or models for behavior from other animals.

- Being a man acting like an ape.

- Because every other species on Earth took its own evolutionary journey to get where it is and how it is.

And our path is special and unique to us, because yes, the reality is chimpanzee alpha males are much more about cooperation and empathy compared to most people's concept of alpha male, but chimps also do a lot of things that we definitely don't want to model.

Like they regularly eat the flesh of other chimpanzees after battle, even young ones.

That is not a behavior I think we should adopt.

There is absolutely a biological basis to why we act the way we act.

So, you cannot understand humans, if you don't pay attention to biology.

And chimps are the closest other species we have to study, but so are bonobos, and they have basically, invented a female-led society based on love and pleasure.

I think the most important point to remember in this whole alpha conversation is this.

We have this very unique and special ability to think about and choose what we want to be and how we want to behave.

I'm not sure a wolf could say that or even a chimpanzee could for that matter.

This is an immense privilege that our species has and we should choose wisely, not just what is best for ourselves, but maybe just maybe, what is also best for the rest of our social species at the same time.

Stay curious.

In 1982, Dutch primatologist Frans De Waal published the book Chimpanzee Pop, Popitics?

Sandal, sandell, sandal.

I need my books.