Decoding Primate Societies: Becoming Alpha & Fluid Gender Roles

Most social animals have social hierarchies. If you put six puppies together, they will fight over who's the highest ranking. If you put six apes together, or if you put young children together in a kindergarten, they will do the same thing. Most young animals and humans will try to establish their rank order, but typically the first position is the most important one, and that's what they fight over. The question is, what does it take to be the alpha or the leader of a particular group?

Frans de Waal, a Dutch primatologist and ethologist, says that most people would think that a primatologist would answer that the alpha of a group is the strongest, the meanest, and the most intimidating. However, that's not really what a leader typically is. For instance, alpha males or females are often also admired. They protect the underdog, they break up fights, and they have high levels of empathy.
So even if some would like to be seen as alphas, if the people around them don't see them that way, they won't be the natural leader of a group.
Frans de Waal has been working with primates and doing research in this field for about 50 years, he is the author of the book "Different Gender through the Eyes of a Primatologist" and in this article we'll go deeper into his surprising findings.

The term alpha male originally came from research with wolves, and it simply referred to the highest-ranking male wolf, de Waal explained in an interview. He goes on to say that people often think that the alpha male is some kind of personality. Actually, the alpha male is just the top male, and he can be a very nice guy or a very nasty guy. The interesting part is that we typically overestimate male dominance in this regard, mainly because some people think of alpha in purely physical terms.

Primate societies are like political systems, and physical power is only one part of the equation. What many people overlook, for example, is that to be the alpha of a group of chimpanzees, the leader needs followers and the acceptance of other chimpanzees. You can't play alpha by yourself. That's why a high-ranking female chimpanzee can have enormous power if she's able to unite all the other females. But more than that, if we look at bonobos, which are as close to us as chimpanzees, we can see that the alpha individual of a group is the female. We find that most of the differences between the sexes are much smaller than many of us would think. We blow them up, but if you measure them, you can see that the different sexes in primates don't have that much effect on who's alpha and who's not.

Robert Martin is an anthropologist who has said that the difference between the sexes is a bimodal difference. What he means is that the differences are statistical and that there are many exceptions. De Waal gives the example of a chimpanzee named Donna, whom he's known since she was three years old. Already at that age, she was different from the others. She was clearly a female, but she liked to wrestle. Then, as she grew older and became an adolescent, she got big shoulders, a lot of big hair, grew a bigger head, and started to look like a male. More than that, she also associated and hung out with the males in her group. That's one individual, and Frans de Waal has seen quite a few individuals among the males that don't behave like males, or females that don't behave like typical chimpanzee females.

De Waal points out that we can see that individual variability is the material of evolution and that the diversity of primal gender fluidity could be the same sort of diversity that we see in human society. He points out that sex is biological. It is defined by genitals, hormones, and chromosomes. Gender, on the other hand, is much more flexible. Gender isn't just about male and female, it's about everything in between. In addition, gender is very much a cultural construct, in the sense that social norms shape the way we think about how to behave as men or women. And those constructs are the definitions of gender. But we can see that they change over time, they change with society. So we could have all this variability and embrace the fluidity of ourselves. De Waal notes that he's never seen this as a problem in the societies of other primates. And that we could learn from them, that they take an individual like Donna the chimpanzee as she is, they don't make a big fuss about it. They are much less normative than we are and, of course, much less ideological than we are.

He has never seen these individuals who deviate a little from the common patterns get into trouble for their deviations, it seems that other primates have a certain empathy and acceptance for them. Coming back to our point about what an alpha or leader is, with the different aspects of their behavior, de Waal says that empathy for each other plays an important role. It would be hard to care about other people and help them if you didn't have empathy for them. So he says that empathy is the glue of our society, and our moral systems would be unthinkable if we did not have empathy for each other.
He's not saying that chimpanzees and bonobos are moral beings like we are, but they clearly can care about someone else's condition. He thinks that a leader needs to pay attention to group dynamics, to make sure that everyone has a voice in the group, and that you, just like alpha chimps, protect the underdog from potential violence or potential abuse. Not only that, but he believes that humans are psychologically like apes. Of course, we are technologically more advanced and so on, but many of the basics of our social relationships, both in terms of the hierarchies that we have, the friendships, and the attachments. In some of these ways, we are very close to the primates. Because of that, we might want to look at them at times and reflect on what we could learn from their behavior with each other. Especially when it comes to gender fluidity and breaking the strong, hard, and physically dominant myth about what an alpha or a leader should be or in other words... shouldn't be.