UNLABELLED Research on social instability has focused on its detrimental consequences, but most people are resilient and respond by invoking various coping strategies. To investigate cellular processes underlying such strategies, a dominance hierarchy of rats was formed and then destabilized. Regardless of social position, rats from disrupted hierarchies had fewer new neurons in the hippocampus...

O Abstract Agents are automating many tasks that used to be done by people. As agents begin to address more complex domains of human life, they will need to develop an understanding of the dominance hierarchies that people understand intuitively. We present examples of species with social hierarchies that occur in the natural world, in particular the gray wolf (Canis lupus) and the chimpanzee (...

Sociality, the formation of social groups by a species, is often seen as an evolved solution to some of life’s most basic problems, such as how to obtain food, how to successfully reproduce and care for young, and how to avoid predation long enough for these prior concerns to be issues at all. While helping to solve many of these problems, sociality also presents a unique challenge: how are lim...

Many animal social structures are organized hierarchically, with some individuals monopolizing resources. Dominance hierarchies have received great attention from behavioural and evolutionary ecologists. There are many methods for inferring hierarchies from social interactions. Yet, there are no clear guidelines about how many observed dominance interactions (i.e. sampling effort) are necessary...

Although influence hierarchies are a crucial part of social life, the process by which they emerge is not well-understood. We propose that status characteristics and social identity processes work together to generate social hierarchies. Visible (readily observable) status characteristics restrict information and opportunities for interaction, creating homogenous local interaction contexts. Wit...

Primates are remarkably adept at ranking each other within social hierarchies, a capacity that is critical to successful group living. Surprisingly little, however, is understood about the neurobiology underlying this quintessential aspect of primate cognition. In our experiment, participants first acquired knowledge about a social and a nonsocial hierarchy and then used this information to gui...

The standard approach in accounting for hierarchical differentiation in biology and the social sciences considers a hierarchy as a static distribution of individuals possessing differing amounts of some valued commodity, assumes that the hierarchy is generated by micro-level processes involving individuals, and attempts to reverse engineer the processes that produced the hierarchy. However, suf...