Social animals are known to organize their social groups in a hierarchy with an Alpha at the top, and the social scales typically possess a particular shape. Orders that contain one alpha individual and multiple betas beneath are referred to as “pyramidal.” Gorillas have an apex male with a silverback dominant, and lizards, ants, and mice have a single person who is dominant over a variety of others. The study reveals a “structural regularity that has not been systematically studied,” claims lead author Olivier Mascaro, a cognitive scientist at France’s national study center CNRS in Paris.

Mascaro and coworkers first looked into Mascaro and colleagues turned to the repository of social-competition data to track dominance relations across various taxonomic categories that range from rodents to the social insect to primate. Researchers applied structural analyses to these dominance networks to determine the prevalence of hierarchical pyramids in the data about another possible arrangement known as the “tree,” in which two individuals with alpha dominance dominate three others. Trees are the same in complexity and have the same number of members as the basic pyramid, so they should be as frequent as pyramids if the pattern of dominance relationships resulted from random luck.

Mascaro has found that pyramids were significantly more frequent than trees in the data. Similar studies of human data, focusing on conflicts within more than 20 groups of children, revealed that pyramidal dominance patterns are also common for children aged 13 months up to six years old.

Then, Mascaro took adult participants into his laboratory in Paris to test their beliefs about social structure. Participants watched text-based instructions on a computer screen that gradually revealed the relationships between the imagined group of people. For example, a participant may have been taught on one screen which Mike Jack and Mike Jack are best friends, but on the next slide, Bob is more dominant than Jack. Participants were then tested on their conclusions regarding relationships they had yet to be taught, for instance, the social connection betweenbetween Bob and Mike. The subjects consistently made inferences that matched an underlying pyramidal structure. For example, in this case, if Bob is dominant over Jack, it is also likely that he will be prevalent with Mike, Jack’s best friend. Mike.

In a different test, Mascaro had 14-month-old toddlers be placed on their parents on their lap in the soundproof booth. They were shown videos with animated geometric shapes with eyes battling to make a space at the center of the monitor. The first clip shows the character “A” might prevail over the surface “B,” dashing into the middle of the screen and pressing “B” away. In a subsequent video, the toddler could observe two characters, “B” and “C,” play off and interact with each other, triggering signals that communicate the existence of an affiliation. In the end, researchers showed the toddler a 3rd video that showed the characters “A” and “C” playing. Infants are known to stare longer at unanticipated events than familiar ones. In video 3, if a friendly “C” prevailed over an aggressive “A,” then the children stared at the screen for a couple of seconds longer, on average, compared to videos of the outcomes that could be expected based on a pyramidal structure (where the aggressive “A” is above both “B” and “C”). These results in children suggest that dominance patterns are embedded in the human brain, Mascaro says.

The research findings could help to understand the existence of dominance hierarchies and their persistence as unknown. The most popular belief is that because an alpha with monopoly power over resources, there is less conflict between less powerful individuals. Similar to a “tree” structure two, alphas would be more likely to have competition. Ultimately, pyramids are much more secure than tree structures and, consequently, more widespread. The latest research confirms the concept, Mascaro says.

“The strength of the work is the multiple lines of investigation,” claims Cognitive researcher Denise Cummins at the University of Colorado Boulder. Experiments across various species, including human tests, provide convincing evidence of the reasons behind hierarchies’ formation.