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Human and animal dominance hierarchies show a pyramidal structure guiding adult and infant social inferences

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Abstract

This study investigates the structure of social hierarchies. We hypothesized that if social dominance relations serve to regulate conflicts over resources, then hierarchies should converge towards pyramidal shapes. Structural analyses and simulations confirmed this hypothesis, revealing a triadic-pyramidal motif across human and non-human hierarchies (114 species). Phylogenetic analyses showed that this pyramidal motif is widespread, with little influence of group size or phylogeny. Furthermore, nine experiments conducted in France found that human adults (N = 120) and infants (N = 120) draw inferences about dominance relations that are consistent with hierarchies’ pyramidal motif. By contrast, human participants do not draw equivalent inferences based on a tree-shaped pattern with a similar complexity to pyramids. In short, social hierarchies exhibit a pyramidal motif across a wide range of species and environments. From infancy, humans exploit this regularity to draw systematic inferences about unobserved dominance relations, using processes akin to formal reasoning.

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Fig. 1: Structural predictions based on the conflict-regulatory hypothesis.
Fig. 2: Assessment of pyramidal shape per taxonomic category (N = 318 independent groups).
Fig. 3: Timeline of trials testing adults on dominance, friendship or enmity relations.
Fig. 4: Examples of pyramidal and tree-based inferences.
Fig. 5: Network structures and results of studies 2–4.
Fig. 6: Network structures and events used in studies 5a, 5b, 6a, 6b, 7a and 7b.
Fig. 7: Looking time per situation (coherent versus incoherent) and study (N = 20 per study).
Fig. 8: Transition probability graph for triadic structures with two or three relations.

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Data availability

All data are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PK7BG.

Code availability

All analysis scripts are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PK7BG.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the participants and their parents, M. Brun and A. Couderc for their help with data collection and coding, as well as all the members of the Laboratory on Language, Brain and Cognition (L2C2) and of the Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (INCC) for their invaluable input at all stages of this research. This work was supported by a fellowship from the French National Research Agency (ANR) to O.M. (Foundtrust, ANR-21-CE28-0017). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, the decision to publish or the preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Paris Cité, CNRS, Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, Paris, France

    Olivier Mascaro & Adeline Depierreux

  2. Institut des Sciences Cognitives—Marc Jeannerod, UMR5229, CNRS and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Bron, France

    Nicolas Goupil

  3. École normale supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, France

    Hugo Pantecouteau

  4. Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, CNRS, INSERM, Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon, U1028, UMR5292, Trajectoires, Bron, France

    Jean-Baptiste Van der Henst

  5. Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, LPC, Marseille, France

    Nicolas Claidière

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  1. Olivier Mascaro
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Contributions

O.M. supervised the project. O.M. and N.C. designed the network data analysis. O.M. and A.D. gathered children’s network data from the literature. N.C. implemented the network data analysis. O.M., N.G., H.P. and J.B.V.H. designed the experimental studies. N.G. and H.P. created the experimental materials. N.G., H.P. and A.D. collected and coded the experimental data. O.M. wrote the analysis script for experimental data. O.M. wrote the original draft. O.M., N.G., H.P., A.D., J.-B.V.H. and N.C. reviewed and edited the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Olivier Mascaro.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Denise D. Cummins and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Normalized z-scores per triadic pattern and category (N = 318 independent groups).

We computed normalized z-scores for basic patterns that can occur in a dominance structure: triadic pyramids, triadic trees, chains, transitive triads, and circular triads. Data reveal a pyramidal motif, with an overrepresentation of pyramids in all taxonomic groups. The results also confirm that dominance relations tend to be transitive in all taxonomic groups, with an overrepresentation of transitive structures and an under-representation of chains and circular structures. Red dots and error bars indicate means and bootstrapped 95% CIs; vertical bars within boxes indicate medians, and boxes indicate the interquartile range; right whiskers represent data up to 1.5 times the interquartile range above the third quartile, and left whiskers represent data up to 1.5 times the interquartile range below the first quartile; Each grey dot represents data from one social group. P values were assessed with two-tailed one-sample Wilcoxon tests, and were corrected for multiple comparisons across taxonomic categories using the Holm-Bonferroni procedure. * p < .05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001, ns: non-significant.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Average triadic pyramidal metric per species organized by phylogeny for primates species only (36 species, 100 groups).

We used the “10kTrees” phylogeny to estimate relatedness among primates105.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Average triadic pyramidal metric per species organized by phylogeny for all species (110 species, 311 groups).

We used a consensus tree from the Open Tree of Life (v.13.14, https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/about/synthesis-release/v13.4) to estimate relatedness among species.

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Mascaro, O., Goupil, N., Pantecouteau, H. et al. Human and animal dominance hierarchies show a pyramidal structure guiding adult and infant social inferences. Nat Hum Behav 7, 1294–1306 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01634-5

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