When the alpha chimp charges, you cannot help but take note – with your ears and with your eyes. Designed to intimidate his foes and rally his submissive base, these verbal outbursts reinforce the president’s dominance by reminding everybody of his wrath and his force. Trump’s incendiary tweets are the human equivalent of a charging display. Once the chaos ends, there is a period of peace and order, wherein rival males pay homage to the alpha, visiting him, grooming him, expressing various forms of submission. Pandemonium ensues as rival males cower in fear and females grab their little ones and run for cover. The top male essentially goes berserk and starts screaming, hooting, and gesticulating wildly as he charges toward other males nearby. When it comes to US presidents, we expect to see a bit of both.įor Trump, however, it is dominance all the way through.Īn especially effective dominance mechanism for the alpha chimp is the charging display. įor human beings today, dominance and prestige compete with each other as the two primal expressions of leadership. In the prestige paradigm, leaders attain their authority in the group by demonstrating culturally valued expertise – as, for example, in cooking, defending the tribe, healing, peacemaking, or (in the modern world) science, education, technology, the arts, business, law, medicine, communication, and so on. Both are grounded in human evolution, but the prestige form is younger, tracing back a mere million years or so to the time when our hominid ancestors began to form culture. Social psychologists today distinguish between the social dominance form of human leadership, on the one hand, and leadership through prestige on the other. Our expectation that social status can be seized through physical power and threat – that the strongest, biggest and boldest may indeed lord it over the rest of us – is very old, awesomely intuitive, and deeply ingrained. Because chimps and humans evolved from a common ancestor going back 5-7m years, we humans know deep in our brains what social dominance is all about. The alpha leader dominates all others through tactics of threat, intimidation, bluffing, and outright aggression – and importantly, by forming short-term, pragmatic coalitions (let us call them “deals”) with other high-status males.Ĭhimpanzee politics can be intricate, but they always obey the rules of social dominance. Power is vested in the biggest, strongest, and most outgoing males in the group, with the alpha male on top. In the wild and in captivity, chimpanzee colonies organize themselves into tightly structured hierarchies. The curious case of Donald Trump, however, now shows that human beings turn out to be a lot like chimps.
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