The Pecking Order: Why Every Society Has Hierarchy (and Why Some Have Less)

Follows: The Veil of Ignorance: John Rawls and the Quest for a Fair Society (Philosophy), The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented (Politics), and Clase Social y Dinero (Español)

In this deep dive
1. Two ladders to the top: dominance and prestige
2. The band that cut its leaders down to size
3. What changed: storage, inheritance and grain
4. The great argument: did farming really trap us?
5. Rank under the skin: status and health
6. What the research can and can't tell us

In 1921 a Norwegian zoologist still in his twenties, Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, described something any farmer already half knew. A flock of hens is not a crowd. It is a ladder. One hen pecks every other hen and is pecked by none; the next pecks all but the first; and so on down to a bird that everyone pecks. He called it the Hackordnung, and when the idea reached English a few years later it became the "pecking order."

Now picture a scene of the kind anthropologists described in the Kalahari. A hunter brings a large kill back to camp. Nobody cheers. Instead, people find fault with it, as if it were hardly worth carrying home. The anthropologist Richard Lee, who lived with these foragers, recorded the reason: the band runs down a successful hunter's kill to deflate his pride, or, as his hosts put it, to "cool his heart."

Both scenes are about rank. The hens show what happens when rank is left to strength. The hunters show something stranger: a whole community working, deliberately and every day, to stop rank from hardening. Human history sits between those two pictures, and so does every society alive today.

Earlier pieces in this library asked what a fair society would look like (Rawls's veil of ignorance) and how people with different values argue about it (the political spectrum). The Spanish piece Clase Social y Dinero looked at how class feels from the inside. This deep dive goes underneath all of them, to the research on where hierarchy comes from in the first place. It is a field with real findings and live, sometimes bad-tempered, disputes. Both are shown here.

Part 1 — Two ladders to the top: dominance and prestige

For much of the twentieth century, research on hierarchy in animals focused on one thing: dominance. Rank went to whoever could win fights, or make others believe they would. Chimpanzees, baboons and hens all fit that picture, and it was tempting to assume humans did too.

In 2001 the anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White argued that this was only half the story. Their paper, "The evolution of prestige," drew a sharp line between two ways of getting others to defer to you:

• Dominance is deference extracted by force or the threat of force. People give way to a dominant individual because they're afraid.
• Prestige is deference freely conferred. People give way to a prestigious individual because they want something from them: their knowledge, their skill, their good opinion.

Why would anyone hand out deference for free? Henrich and Gil-White's answer was about learning. Humans live by culture, by copying techniques, recipes and know-how from others. A good learner needs to find the best models and get close to them. Flattering, helping and deferring to skilled people buys you time near them, which is time spent learning. Once everyone does this, deference itself becomes a signal: a newcomer can see who others are clustering around and start copying them too.

The theory made testable predictions, and a 2013 study by Joey Cheng, Jessica Tracy, Henrich and colleagues tested some of them. They put strangers into small groups to solve a task, then asked everyone to rate each other. People who used either strategy, bullying or expertise, ended up with more influence, both in others' ratings and in a behavioural measure of who actually changed the group's answers. But the two felt very different: prestigious people were liked, dominant people were not. In a second study, observers watching video of the groups spent more time looking at both the dominant and the prestigious members than at anyone else.

Humans have two ladders to the top. One is climbed by making people afraid of you; the other by making them want to learn from you. Both work. Only one makes you liked.

The two routes also seem to pay off in the oldest currency of all. A 2011 study by Christopher von Rueden, Michael Gurven and Hillard Kaplan in a small-scale Amerindian society found that both dominant men (those likely to win a fight) and prestigious men (those with community-wide influence) had more children, and prestigious men also lost fewer children to early death.

And the hunger for standing appears to be general. A 2015 review in Psychological Bulletin by Cameron Anderson and colleagues, defining status as "the respect, admiration, and voluntary deference individuals are afforded by others," concluded that the desire for it behaves like a fundamental human motive: people monitor it constantly, react strongly when it's threatened, and their well-being and health track it.

What's still argued about. Not everyone accepts that dominance and prestige are cleanly separate in real life. Plenty of leaders combine both, and prestige can harden into control of resources, which is a kind of dominance. And much of the experimental evidence comes from small groups of strangers in a laboratory, which may not capture how rank works across a whole society. The distinction is widely used, but researchers still debate how neatly the world divides along it.

Part 2 — The band that cut its leaders down to size

If people crave status, and some are willing to bully for it, why were so many foraging societies famously egalitarian? This puzzle was the life's work of the American anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who died in 2021.

Boehm's answer, first set out in a 1993 paper in Current Anthropology titled "Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy," and later in his book Hierarchy in the Forest (1999), was that foragers are not equal because nobody wants to dominate. They are equal despite the fact that some people do, because everyone else gangs up to stop them.

In an ordinary dominance hierarchy, the strong control the weak. In what Boehm called a reverse dominance hierarchy, the many control the would-be strong. The rank-and-file act together, as a kind of coalition, to keep any one person from bossing the rest. Drawing on reports from 48 societies, from small foraging bands to settled chiefdoms, he described a toolkit that turns up again and again:

1. Public opinion. People talk, and a reputation for arrogance spreads fast.
2. Criticism and ridicule. The upstart is mocked, sometimes gently, sometimes not.
3. Disobedience. Orders are simply ignored.
4. Extreme sanctions. In rare cases, a persistent bully is driven out or even killed.

The Kalahari custom of insulting the meat is one of these levelling habits. Others reported from the same region are just as clever. Credit for a kill can go to the owner of the arrow rather than the hunter, and arrows are lent and swapped, so glory gets spread around. A hunter who has had a run of successes may take time off to avoid other people's envy.

Foragers were not equal because nobody wanted power. They were equal because everyone else was watching.

Boehm drew a large conclusion from this: that for most of the human past, people lived in groups like these, consciously holding down their own primate tendencies toward dominance. The anthropologist James Woodburn had earlier, in 1982, singled out "immediate-return" societies, where people get a direct and immediate return from their work instead of investing it over months, as the clearest egalitarian cases. Leadership in such groups existed, but as influence rather than command.

Two cautions. First, "egalitarian" here means mainly that no one could give orders to other adults. It does not automatically mean equality between men and women or between young and old, which varies from one society to another. Second, the foragers studied in the twentieth century were not fossils. They lived alongside farmers, herders and states, and many scholars warn against treating them as a window onto the Stone Age. Boehm still thought the pattern was too widespread to be an accident.

Notice how this connects to Part 1. Levelling customs target dominance, not prestige. A skilled hunter is still admired and listened to; he just isn't allowed to turn that admiration into orders. Henrich and colleagues have argued exactly this: prestige, which can't easily be stockpiled, survives in egalitarian bands as informal leadership, while the conversion of prestige into lasting power is what the band polices.

Boehm later pushed the argument one step further, in Moral Origins (2012). If bands punished bullies and cheats over a very long stretch of prehistory, he reasoned, then people who could control their own urge to dominate would have done better than people who couldn't. Group policing, in other words, may have shaped human nature itself, favouring a conscience that makes us feel shame before others punish us. He called this process social selection. It remains a hypothesis, hard to test directly, but it offers one explanation for why humans are so sensitive to being thought arrogant.

Part 3 — What changed: storage, inheritance and grain

So how did we get from bands that mocked a good hunter to kings and emperors? The traditional answer, still found in many textbooks, is a sequence formulated by the anthropologist Elman Service in 1962: band → tribe → chiefdom → state. Each step brought larger groups, more inequality, and more permanent leaders. In a tribe, a "big man" could win influence through his own achievements, but his position wasn't inherited. In a chiefdom, rank passed down through families. In a state, a ruling class backed by officials, taxes and soldiers took over.

That ladder is now heavily qualified (see Part 4), but the research of the last twenty years has sharpened the question of why inequality grows, and the answers are more interesting than "farming happened."

Wealth you can pass on. In 2009 a team led by Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and the economist Samuel Bowles studied 21 historical and contemporary small-scale societies. They separated three kinds of wealth: material (land, livestock, stored goods), embodied (strength, health, skill) and relational (networks of allies and partners). What mattered was how much of each could be handed down to children. Among foragers and horticulturalists, wealth passed down only weakly between generations, and inequality stayed low, comparable to the most equal modern countries. Among herders and farmers, whose livelihoods rest on animals and land that can be handed on, transmission was strong, and inequality reached levels comparable to, or even above, the most unequal modern economies.

Summarised from Borgerhoff Mulder et al., Science, 2009.

Wealth you can defend. A 2016 review by Siobhán Mattison and colleagues put it in two words: inequality depends on wealth being defensible and transmissible. A herd or a field can be guarded and inherited; a knack for tracking cannot. They added that this only became a lasting force after the climate stabilised in the Holocene, the warm period that began about 11,700 years ago, when farming started independently in several parts of the world.

Houses as a measuring stick. Inequality in societies without writing is hard to measure, so in 2017 Timothy Kohler and a large team used one consistent proxy: the spread of house sizes, converted into a Gini coefficient (the standard measure, where 0 means everyone has the same and 1 means one household has everything). Wealth gaps generally grew with domestication and with the size of political units. After the Neolithic, though, Eurasia pulled ahead of North America and Mesoamerica. Their explanation: Eurasia had large animals that could be domesticated, which made it profitable to farm much more land (think of ox-drawn ploughs) and eventually produced mounted warrior elites who could build bigger polities.

Grain makes states. The political scientist James C. Scott, in Against the Grain (2017), added a sharper edge. Early states, he argued, grew where people farmed cereals, and not by accident. Only cereals, in his words, "can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable." A tax collector can see a wheat field ripen and measure the harvest; he can't easily tax tubers left in the ground. Scott's early states were not gifts of civilisation but coercive machines: hierarchical, beset by malnutrition and disease, and often based on slavery. He also stressed that settled life, farming and towns were all in place long before anything like a state appeared in Mesopotamia.

Inequality didn't arrive with the first seed. It arrived when wealth became something you could fence, store, tax and leave to your children.

Part 4 — The great argument: did farming really trap us?

The story in Part 3 has a familiar shape: equality in the beginning, then a fall into hierarchy that was hard to reverse. Versions of it go back to Rousseau. In 2021 the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow published a 700-page attack on that shape, The Dawn of Everything. Graeber died in September 2020, shortly after they finished it. The book became an international bestseller and set off one of the liveliest academic fights of the decade.

Their case, at its strongest. Graeber and Wengrow argued that the question "what is the origin of inequality?" is itself the problem, because it assumes humans started in one simple condition and then moved along a single track. Instead, they gathered evidence that early humans experimented constantly:

• Seasonal politics. Some societies switched between authoritarian and communal arrangements depending on the time of year, gathering for a season under strict leaders and then dispersing into small, looser groups. If people could switch, the authors asked, in what sense were they "stuck" at any stage?
• Monuments before farming. Göbekli Tepe, in today's Turkey, was built from around 9500 BCE by hunter-gatherers who supplemented their diet with early domesticated cereals. Large-scale cooperation did not need farms or kings.
• Big settlements without obvious rulers. The "mega-sites" of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture in today's Ukraine, around 4100 to 3500 BCE, held up to about three thousand structures. Graeber and Wengrow present them as early cities with little sign of palaces, temples or a ruling class.
• Cities that changed course. At Teotihuacan in Mexico, archaeologists have found no royal palaces or portraits of rulers of the kind that fill Maya and Zapotec sites, and many scholars conclude it had some form of collective government; some read a shift, around 250 to 350 CE, from centralised rule to a more shared one.

From all this, they proposed that what modern people have lost is not an original equality but three basic freedoms: to move away, to disobey, and to reorganise society into a new form. The real question, they suggested, is not how inequality began but how we "got stuck."

The critics' case, at its strongest. Many reviewers praised the book's ambition. Many specialists also attacked its handling of evidence, and the attacks came from serious people:

Appiah's review in the New York Review of Books gave a concrete example. On the Trypillia mega-sites, he cited the archaeologist John Chapman, who suspects the thousand-odd houses at a site weren't all lived in at the same time, which would make the "city" much smaller. Appiah also argued that tentative suggestions early in the book harden into established facts later, and that the absence of evidence for rulers is not evidence of their absence. Wengrow replied at length, and the exchange is worth reading in full.

The live question is not whether early humans were creative about power. Everyone now agrees they were. It is how often that creativity beat the pressures of scale, storage and war.

Where this leaves the reader. Even several critics granted some of the book's central points; Appiah, for one, called its argument against historical determinism "immensely valuable." Human prehistory looks more varied than the old ladder suggested; large-scale cooperation predates states; and hierarchy was not a single event but something that rose, fell and rose again in different places. Other points remain open: how many large early settlements truly lacked elites, how often seasonal equality was the norm rather than the exception, and whether the material pressures in Part 3 make lasting hierarchy very likely once populations grow. Notice that two of the critics in the table, Feinman and Smith, co-authored the house-size study in Part 3. The fight is not between people who care about evidence and people who don't. It is about how to read thin evidence from the deep past.

Part 5 — Rank under the skin: status and health

A note: this section describes population research on social position and health. It is not medical advice, and an individual's health depends on many things beyond rank.

If hierarchy were only about who gets the best food, it would matter less. The research of the last fifty years suggests something more uncomfortable: where you stand on a social ladder seems to get into your body.

The Whitehall studies. In 1967 researchers began following more than 17,500 male British civil servants aged 20 to 64. Civil service grades are precise, so they could compare administrators at the top with messengers and doorkeepers at the bottom. Over ten years, in a 1984 paper led by Michael Marmot, the men in the lowest grade died at about three times the rate of the administrators, from heart disease, from a range of other causes, and from all causes combined. And it wasn't just the bottom versus the top. Each step down the ladder brought higher risk: a gradient, not a cliff.

The obvious explanations, smoking, blood pressure, cholesterol and exercise, explained only a minority of the gap, roughly a quarter to two-fifths depending on the analysis. A second study, Whitehall II, recruited about 10,300 civil servants, men and women aged 35 to 55, from 1985 to 1988. It found the same gradient for angina, chronic bronchitis and self-rated health, and in a 1997 paper Marmot's team reported that the largest single contributor to the grade gap in new heart disease was low control at work: having little say over what you do and how you do it. Adjusting for job control, standard risk factors and height erased most of the difference. Marmot later called the pattern "the status syndrome."

Sources: Marmot, Shipley & Rose, Lancet 1984; Marmot et al., Lancet 1991 and 1997.

One worry is reverse causation: maybe sick people drift down the ladder, rather than the ladder making people sick. A 2003 Whitehall II analysis tested this directly over ten years and found little evidence that poor health pushed people down; the effect of position on later health was much larger.

Baboons and macaques. Animal studies let researchers do what they can't do with people. The primatologist Robert Sapolsky has studied wild baboons in Kenya since 1978. His 2005 review in Science made a key point: whether high-ranking or low-ranking animals are more stressed is not fixed. It varies with how the species, and the particular group, is socially organised.

One troop gave him a natural experiment. In the early 1980s some males of "Forest Troop," the ones most involved in dominance fights, took to raiding a tourist lodge's garbage pit. In 1983 tuberculosis from infected meat in the dump broke out, and by 1986 every one of those refuse-eating males was dead: 46 percent of the troop's adult males. The survivors were less aggressive males, and the troop developed what Sapolsky and Lisa Share called a "pacific culture": more grooming, a relaxed hierarchy, and signs of less stress among low-ranking males. A decade later, when none of the males from that time remained, new males who had joined from other troops had adopted the same culture. Hierarchy's harshness, in other words, wasn't fixed by biology; it could be learned and unlearned.

In 2016 Noah Snyder-Mackler and colleagues went further, experimentally rearranging the social ranks of female rhesus macaques. Low rank, imposed this way, changed the activity of immune genes toward a more inflammatory state, and the effects were largely reversible when rank changed. That's about as close to proof as this field gets that low status itself, not just poverty or bad habits, can alter the body.

Rank is not just where you stand. It is how much control you have over your own day, and the body seems to keep count.

How you see your own rank. In 2000 Nancy Adler and colleagues asked 157 women to rate their own standing in society. That subjective rating was more consistently linked to measures such as self-rated health, heart rate and the stress hormone cortisol than income or education were, and most links held after controlling for them. Feeling low may matter in its own right.

The size of the gap today. A 2016 study by Raj Chetty and colleagues, using 1.4 billion tax records, found that in the United States between 2001 and 2014 the richest 1% of men lived 14.6 years longer than the poorest 1%, and the richest women 10.1 years longer than the poorest.

The live dispute: does inequality itself make a society sicker? Here researchers genuinely disagree. In a 2015 review, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, authors of The Spirit Level, argued that the evidence "strongly suggests" wide income gaps damage population health. An earlier systematic review of 98 studies, led by John Lynch in 2004, concluded there was "little support" for income inequality as a major, general cause of health differences between rich countries, while agreeing that raising the incomes of the poorest would improve their health. Both camps accept that being lower on the ladder is bad for you. They disagree about whether a steeper ladder harms everyone on it.

Part 6 — What the research can and can't tell us

Put the pieces together and a picture emerges, with its uncertainties attached.

What the evidence supports fairly well:
- Humans have a deep appetite for status, and at least two routes to it: dominance and prestige.
- Many foraging societies held dominance down deliberately, through ridicule, levelling customs and the threat of collective action.
- Inequality tends to grow when the most important wealth can be stored, defended and inherited, which farming and herding made far more common.
- Position on a social ladder is linked to health along a gradient, and animal experiments show rank itself can change the body.

What remains genuinely open:
- How typical the well-studied foragers were of the deep human past.
- How many early large settlements truly lacked rulers, and how often seasonal or experimental politics were the norm.
- Whether material pressures make lasting hierarchy nearly inevitable once societies grow, or whether people have more room to choose than the old story allowed.
- Whether more unequal societies are less healthy overall, or only harder on those near the bottom.

It's also worth remembering how recent the fully administered state is. James C. Scott argued that until roughly 400 years ago, a large share of the world's people had never seen a routine tax collector, or could still slip out of a state's reach: they lived in mountains, steppes, forests and marshes that states found it impossible or not worth the trouble to rule. For most of history, in other words, a large share of humanity lived beyond the reach of the most formal hierarchies of all.

There's also a lesson that cuts across political lines. If you read this research as proof that hierarchy is "natural" and so unchangeable, you are ignoring the foragers, Forest Troop, and every society that rebuilt its institutions. If you read it as proof that hierarchy is a recent mistake we can simply drop, you are ignoring how widespread status-seeking is and how hard the pressures of scale have pushed. The research supports something more modest and more useful: hierarchy is a constant temptation, but its steepness and its kind vary enormously, and people have shaped both.

That suggests a practical set of questions you can ask of any hierarchy, whether it's a nation, a company, a school or a family group chat:

None of these questions tells you what the right answer is. A hospital or an army may need clear lines of command; a band of friends may not. But they turn a vague feeling that something is "unfair" or "just how things are" into something you can look at and argue about.

That is where Rawls's veil of ignorance comes back in. Behind the veil, you don't know whether you'll be the administrator or the doorkeeper. The Whitehall studies suggest that the difference isn't only in pay. It may be years of life. Whether a society should flatten its ladder, keep it but make it easier to climb, or leave it to markets and merit is a values question, and the political spectrum piece lays out the strongest cases on each side. What the science can do is tell you what the ladder is made of. The next two pieces in this series look at the people who tried to describe its rungs, from Marx, Weber and Bourdieu to the elite theorists, and at the long history of castes, estates and classes.

The takeaway

Every human society has hierarchy, but not of one kind. Dominance is rank taken by fear; prestige is rank given for skill. Many foragers kept dominance down by acting together against would-be bosses, and inequality grew most where wealth could be stored, defended and inherited. How far farming "trapped" humanity is a live fight between scholars like Graeber and Wengrow and their critics. Meanwhile, research from the Whitehall studies to rhesus macaques suggests that low rank, and especially low control over one's own life, gets under the skin.

Try this: for one week, notice each time someone in your life defers to someone else, at work, in a family chat, in a meeting. Ask: is this dominance (fear) or prestige (wanting to learn from them)? Then ask the harder question about yourself: when people defer to you, which ladder are they on?

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Schjelderup-Ebbe's "pecking order" (1921–22): summarised in Wikipedia's "Pecking order," which cites his 1922 paper.
- Henrich, J. & Gil-White, F. "The evolution of prestige." Evolution and Human Behavior 22(3), 2001. Cheng, J.T., Tracy, J.L., Foulsham, T., Kingstone, A. & Henrich, J. "Two ways to the top." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2013. Henrich, J., Chudek, M. & Boyd, R. "The Big Man Mechanism." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2015 (source for the Kalahari levelling customs, citing Lee 1979 and Johnson & Earle 1987).
- von Rueden, C., Gurven, M. & Kaplan, H. "Why do men seek status?" Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2011. Anderson, C., Hildreth, J.A.D. & Howland, L. "Is the desire for status a fundamental human motive?" Psychological Bulletin, 2015.
- Boehm, C. "Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy." Current Anthropology 34(3), 1993; Hierarchy in the Forest (1999). Woodburn, J. "Egalitarian Societies." Man 17(3), 1982.
- Borgerhoff Mulder, M. et al. "Intergenerational wealth transmission and the dynamics of inequality in small-scale societies." Science, 2009. Mattison, S.M. et al. "The evolution of inequality." Evolutionary Anthropology, 2016. Kohler, T.A. et al. "Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica." Nature, 2017. Scott, J.C. Against the Grain (2017). Service's band-tribe-chiefdom-state scheme (1962): summarised in Wikipedia's "Chiefdom."
- Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. The Dawn of Everything (2021) and its reception; Appiah, K.A. "Digging for Utopia," New York Review of Books, 16 December 2021; Scheidel and Feinman commentaries in Cliodynamics, 2022. Dates for Göbekli Tepe, Çatalhöyük, the Trypillia mega-sites and Teotihuacan: the corresponding Wikipedia entries, used as leads.
- Marmot, M.G., Shipley, M.J. & Rose, G. "Inequalities in death." Lancet, 1984. Marmot, M.G. et al. "Health inequalities among British civil servants: the Whitehall II study." Lancet, 1991; "Contribution of job control and other risk factors to social variations in coronary heart disease incidence." Lancet, 1997. Chandola, T. et al. "Health selection in the Whitehall II study." Social Science & Medicine, 2003.
- Sapolsky, R.M. "The influence of social hierarchy on primate health." Science, 2005. Sapolsky, R.M. & Share, L.J. "A pacific culture among wild baboons." PLoS Biology, 2004. Snyder-Mackler, N. et al. "Social status alters immune regulation and response to infection in macaques." Science, 2016.
- Adler, N.E. et al. "Relationship of subjective and objective social status..." Health Psychology, 2000. Chetty, R. et al. "The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001–2014." JAMA, 2016. Pickett, K.E. & Wilkinson, R.G. "Income inequality and health: a causal review." Social Science & Medicine, 2015. Lynch, J. et al. "Is income inequality a determinant of population health?" Milbank Quarterly, 2004.

Go deeper
- 📘 Hierarchy in the Forest — Christopher Boehm (the reverse dominance hierarchy, from the person who named it)
- 📘 The Dawn of Everything — David Graeber & David Wengrow (read it alongside Appiah's review below, and argue with both)
- 🌐 Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Digging for Utopia," New York Review of Books (the sharpest critical review, and a model of how to check a big book against its sources)
- 📘 The Status Syndrome — Michael Marmot (the Whitehall findings, told by the man who led them)
- 📘 Behave — Robert Sapolsky (rank, stress and the body, with the baboons of Part 5)
- 📘 The Secret of Our Success — Joseph Henrich (why prestige and copying made humans what we are)