Hierarchically subordinate animals tend to be over-stressed due to uncontrollable and unpredictable mistreatment from superiors
In many species, resources, no matter how plentiful, are rarely divided up evenly. Instead of every contested item being fought for with bloodied tooth and claw, dominance hierarchies emerge. As formalized systems of inequities, these are great substitutes for continual aggression between animals smart enough to know their place.
if you’re going to be a savanna baboon, you probably don’t want to be a low-ranking one. You sit there for two minutes digging some root out of the ground to eat, clean it off and…anyone higher ranking can rip it off from you. You spend hours sweet-talking someone into grooming you, getting rid of those bothersome thorns and nettles and parasites in your hair, and the grooming session can be broken up by someone dominant just for the sheer pleasure of hassling you. Or you could be sitting there, minding your own business, bird-watching, and some high-ranking guy having a bad day decides to make you pay for it by slashing you with his canines. (Such third-party “displacement aggression” accounts for a huge percentage of baboon violence. A middle-ranking male gets trounced in a fight, turns and chases a subadult male, who lunges at an adult female, who bites a juvenile, who slaps an infant.)
For a subordinate animal, life is filled with a disproportionate share not only of physical stressors but of psychological stressors as well—lack of control (Organisms feel a loss of control when faced with an novel and unpredictable situation), of predictability (A lack of predictability as to when a stressor will occur has been shown to increase chronic stress), of outlets for frustration.
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers Chapter 17. The View from the Bottom (p. 498). New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Social Psychology Status:☀️