Yglesias and Fiedersdorf have begun saying that the idea of the alpha male–which, applied to humans, has become a pop-culture cliche–is based on outdated research on wolves. This is wrong.

Here’s the truth: we’ve known, for decades, that animals form dominance hierarchies largely based on fighting ability (though in primates political savvy plays a role). But what maintains the hierarchies has a lot to do with whether you act high-status, whether an animal acts like it’s used to winning fights (simply giving a chimpanzee antidepressants can raise its status). We’ve known, for decades, the game theoretic explanation for why they do this. The wolf thing is just a failure to realize that most groups of wolves are family units, led by a mother and father rather than organized in a dominance hierarchy. But the basic idea is pretty much right.

We also know that human behavior mimics, to a large degree, animal dominance-hierarchy behavior. In particular, studies of hunter-gatherer groups shows that fighting ability plays much the same role in their status hierarchies as in animal status hierarchies. Thanks to modern weaponry and mass combat, individual fighting ability is not so important among modern humans, though our minds seem to contain evolutionary relics from the time when it was: for one thing, tall people tend to be more successful, as if they’re benefiting from an unconscious assumption that the bigger, stronger members of a group always rise to the top.

So, contra the new word in the blogosphere, dominance hierarchies are important throughout the animal world, and some of what we know about them applies to humans. It’s unfortunate that people are hammering the wolf thing, though, because there’s another problem with the “alpha male modern human” idea: modern society is too damn complicated.

Animal groups basically have one measure of status. Hunter-gatherers have at most a few: it may be hard to say whether the chief, the shaman, or the elder is higher-status, these kinds of status can exist alongside each other with no clear way to compare. Modern society, though, has hundreds of status measures. There’s military rank, elected office, money, private-sector job title, number of books sold, number of albums sold, number of regular viewers, number of regular listeners, number of regular readers, links to your blog, olympic gold medals, beauty pageants won, and number of SWPL items you can boast about. I’m sure readers can suggest status measures that I would never think of on my own. These ever-multiplying status measures may be an important way of breaking down the mind-boggling hugeness of modern society. And the situation is further complicated by the fact that within a “field” of status, the standard recognized measure isn’t all there is too it: just because BIll Gates has more money and Microsoft is a bigger company doesn’t mean he’s really higher-status than the guys behind Google.

I’m not sure this means we should dump the pop-culture cliche, though, as long as we recognize it’s limitations. As applied to the the Tucker Maxes of the world, it may hit something deep in the human psyche that will never be captured by any amount of talk of military rank and books sold. The key feature of the “alpha male,” in this sense, seems to be that he will walk into a group of strangers, act like the king of the world, and get away with it to at least some degree. The ability to get away with it, at least a little bit, among strangers is key: every so often you hear stories of some powerful person acting psycho in private, either to immediate underlings or by sending “do you know who I am” threats anonymously. In those cases, they are in a sense “acting high status,” but in a way that only works among people who give their status the fullest credit possible. The cultural “alpha male” archetype is something different–though not necessarily inherently better. Personally, I’m happy to go along with pop-culture on this one, as long as we stay aware of the underlying complexity.